Ashoka Reflections - Jan 2023
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Professor Somak Raychaudhury, eminent Indian astrophysicist, takes over from
Professor Malabika Sarkar, who completed her term after serving as Ashoka
University’s Vice-Chancellor since August 2019.
Professor Raychaudhury was previously the Director of the Inter-University Centre for
Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune.
Professor Raychaudhury graduated from Presidency College, University of Calcutta, and
went on to read Physics at Trinity College, University of Oxford, supported by an Inlaks
Shivdasani scholarship. He did his Ph.D. in Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge,
supported by the Isaac Newton Studentship, where he was awarded a J T Knight prize.
He then moved to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, (CfA) at
Cambridge, USA, as a Smithsonian Fellow. He stayed on to work in the High Energy
Astrophysics division of the CfA, working for a NASA project, as part of the team that
built the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, now in orbit. At this time, he was always a Fellow
of Lowell House, Harvard University.
Professor Raychaudhury worked at IUCAA Pune as an Assistant Professor for a few
years in the 1990s before moving to the University of Birmingham, UK, where he taught
at the School of Physics and Astronomy for more than a decade. He moved back to
India in 2012, to help rebuild Presidency College, Kolkata, into Presidency University,
where he was Dean of Science and Professor and Head of Physics, till he moved to Pune
in September 2015 as the fourth Director of IUCAA, which is one of the top research
institutions in Astrophysics in the world.
His work involves a wide range of topics in Cosmology and Astrophysics and has made
seminal discoveries using observations at radio, optical and X-ray frequencies, from the
ground and from Space. He has worked on exotic stars such as black holes and neutron
stars in nearby galaxies, including our own galaxy, the Milky Way. He has worked on
observational cosmology, in determining the scale and age of the Universe.
Ashoka Reflections | Page 02
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