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.

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