Dr. Somak Raychaudhury of Director, Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, India

Biography:

Somak Raychaudhury is the Director of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune. He was an undergraduate at Presidency College,  Calcutta and at the University of Oxford, UK. After his PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK, he worked at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, USA, where he was part of the team that built the Chandra X-Ray Observatory for NASA. After teaching for over a decade at the University of Birmingham, UK, he returned to India as the Head of Physics and Dean of Sciences at Presidency University, Kolkata, before he became Director of IUCAA. His research involves a wide range of topics in Cosmology and Astrophysics, from the ground and from Space.