sahotra sarkar born 1962 is a philosopher of science and conservation biologist at the university of texas at austin he is one of the founders of systematic conservation planning within conservation biology promoting the use of multicriteria decision analysis and supervising the creation of the consnet decision support system in this context he has advocated participatory environmental planning and strongly criticized the imposition of authoritarian and discriminatory environmental policies on local residents his laboratory also works on a suite of neglected tropical diseases or diseases of poverty including chagas disease dengue leishmaniasis and tickborne diseasesin the philosophy of biology sarkar is known for his work on reductionism and criticism of hereditarian thinking in biology as well as the use of informational concepts in molecular biology in the philosophy of physics sarkar is known for controversially defending the conventionalism of simultaneity in special relativity with john stachel and suggesting a stochastic modification of quantum dynamics earlier in his career he worked in mathematical population genetics where in collaboration with wing ma and guido sandri he was responsible for the standard recursion relation to compute the luriadelbruck distribution in bacterial geneticssarkar is also a noted critic of creationism and intelligent design and played an important role in combating attempts to introduce creationism into high school curricula in texassarkar is originally from india where he lived in darjeeling until 1975 he earned a ba from columbia university and a ma and phd from the university of chicago he was a fellow of the wissenschaftskolleg zu berlin 1996 1997 the dibner institute for the history of science 1993 1994 and the edelstein centre for the philosophy of science 1992 he was a visiting scholar at the max planck institute for the history of science in berlin 1997 1998 2002 2003 and taught at mcgill university before moving to texas his doctoral students include michael ciarleglio david frank trevon fuller justin garson susan mooney and samraat pawar