Somak Raychaudhury

Somak Raychaudhury is currently the Vice-Chancellor of Ashoka University, in Haryana, India. Until recently he was the Director of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune.Dr Raychaudhury graduated from Presidency College, University of Calcutta, and went on he read Physics at Trinity College, University of Oxford. He did his PhD in Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. He then moved to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, (CfA) at Cambridge, USA, where he worked as part of the team that built NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, which is still in orbit. After teaching for 12 years at the University of Birmingham, UK, he moved back to India in 2012, to help re-build Presidency College, Kolkata, into Presidency University, where he was Dean of Science and Professor and Head of Physics, before assuming leading roles at IUCAA and Ashoka University. 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.