Thanu Padmanabhan (born 10 March 1957) is an Indian theoretical physicist and cosmologist whose research spans a wide variety of topics in Gravitation, Structure formation in the universe and Quantum Gravity. He has published nearly 300 papers and reviews in international journals and ten books in these areas. He has made several contributions related to the analysis and modelling of dark energy in the universe and the interpretation of gravity as an emergent phenomenon.