Ayan Banerjee is presently a Professor of Physics and Departmental Chair at IISER Kolkata, and has been working in the field of optics and spectroscopy for the last 25 years. He is a scientist, but his passion and creativity are not confined within the sciences alone, but are spread over the arts as well. Thus, while he is a physicist in terms of profession, he is also involved in professional Bengali and English theatre in the capacity of a playwright, director and actor. He obtained his Ph.D in physics from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, in precision atomic spectroscopy where he measured atomic hyperfine structure to part-per-billion accuracy. Following his Ph.D., he was a research scientist at General Electric (GE) Global Research, Bangalore, India, where he established a precision optics lab that specialized in the development of spectroscopy-assisted sensing for large scale deployment in security, pharma, healthcare, etc. Since 2009, he has been faculty member in the Department of physics at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Kolkata, where other than being deeply involved in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, he has also set up a light-matter interaction lab which chiefly focuses on optical micromanipulation and study of mesoscopic matter employing optical tweezers, with multiple projects in diverse areas of research. In IISER Kolkata, he also plays a key role in science translation into technology, being one of the founder Directors of the Research Innovation and Scientific Entrepreneurship (RISE) Foundation IISER, a Section 8 company formed inside the premises of IISER Kolkata to incubate deep-science based start-ups. As a scientist, Dr. Banerjee has more than 50 published papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and 22 patents. As a thespian involved with the theatre group Mukhosh – he has written 11 plays in Bengali and English, besides having acted and directed several more.