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India's Physics Olympiad talent fuels U.S. brain drain debate
Venture capitalist Debarghya Das shared an analysis days after India's five-member team won gold medals in all five individual events at the 56th International Physics Olympiad
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Ankita Baidya - Tue, 14, Jul 2026
- 04:24 EDT
- 38
India's team won five gold medals at the 56th International Physics Olympiad held in Colombia this month. / IANS
An analysis by Indian-origin venture capitalist Debarghya "Deedy" Das of every Indian medalist at the International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) between 2001 and 2019 has found that nearly 70 percent of those with traceable career data are now based in the United States, reviving discussion around the migration of top scientific talent even as India recorded a historic performance at this year's Olympiad.
Das, a Kolkata-born partner at Menlo Ventures focused on AI and infrastructure investments, published the findings on X after examining 87 unique Indian medalists across 19 Olympiad editions.
Also read: India tops global rankings with 5 gold medals at International Physics Olympiad 2026
Of the 69 medalists for whom current career data could be identified, 79 percent of the total, 48, or 69.6 percent, are now based in the United States, working at quantitative trading firms, FAANG companies and AI research labs, according to Das's analysis.
Seventeen medalists, or 24.6 percent, remain in India, holding positions at research institutions including the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), as well as in the civil services and Indian startups. The remaining four are based in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Singapore.
Among those highlighted in the analysis are Prafulla Dhariwal, a 2013 IPhO gold medalist who is now a technical fellow at OpenAI and contributed to GPT-4o and DALL-E 2, and Parag Agrawal, a 2001 gold medalist and former CEO of Twitter. India-based examples include Prudhvi Tej Immadi, a 2011 silver medalist who now serves as chairman and managing director of APEPDCL, and Piyush Srivastava, a 2005 gold medalist who returned to India as a faculty member at TIFR Mumbai after completing a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley.
India was a tied #1 at the International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) this year with 5/5 Golds.
— Deedy (@deedydas) July 13, 2026
I analyzed every single medalist upto 2021: 70% of them in the US!
Many of these kids will likely go to MIT or IIT and then leave too. The brain drain is very real. pic.twitter.com/BLbd3sYCQq
Das shared the analysis days after India's five-member team won gold medals in all five individual events at the 56th International Physics Olympiad, held in Bucaramanga, Colombia, from July 4 to 12. According to a Press Information Bureau statement, India finished joint first alongside China, Kazakhstan, Russia, South Korea and Taiwan among 381 students representing 87 countries.
The Indian gold medalists were Kanishk Jain of Pune, Riddhesh Anant Bendale of Indore, Rishit Garg of Delhi, Shresth Suraiya of Mumbai and Svarit Joshi of Ahmedabad.
Das studied at La Martiniere for Boys in Kolkata before earning bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from Cornell University. He previously worked at Google and Facebook and was part of the founding engineering team at Glean. In September 2025, he became a partner at Menlo Ventures, where he co-leads the firm's $100 million Anthology Fund with Anthropic.
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