Rajan Jha received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, India, in 2001 and 2007 respectively. His Ph.D. work was on Optical fiber sensors based on surface plasmon resonance. From 2008 to 2009, he was a Post-Doctoral Researcher at ICFO–The Institute of Photonics Sciences, Spain. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Physics at School of Basic Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bhubaneswar, India. He has published more than 65 peer reviewed research articles including a review article and is inventor of a patent along with an author of two books chapters. His research interest in the area of optical sensors and devices have received around 1650 citations. He is a member of the Optical Society of America and an Executive member of Optical Society of India (OSI). He is a recipient of the 2015 ICO-ICTP Gallieno Denardo Award, the DAAD Fellowship (2013), and the JSPS Fellowship in 2009. He is a Associate of International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) Italy, the Indian Academy of Sciences-Bangalore and is a member of National Academy of Sciences India.

As a speaker for OSI Foundation Lecture Program in Odisha (India), he has visited many degree colleges in last couple of years. He has delivered lecture on Optical Fiber Devices to promote science of light and have conducted workshops on Fun with Light for school children where students had hands on homemade optical experiments developed in his Nanophotonics and Plasmonics Laboratory at IIT Bhubaneswar.