My Family
(From left)My sister, father, mother, and me

Life before Astronomy

I grew up mostly in the southern part of India. I loved astronomy as a kid - I watched all the astronomy documentaries on TV, cut out astronomy related articles in the newspaper, and even participated in NASA's lunar outpost design challenge in 2006.

None of my friends and no one in my entire extended family had studied or even had a passing interest in astronomy. To this day, my sister is the only person who shares my enthusiasm for the subject. Consequently, information on how to build a career in astronomy was hard to come by for us pre-internet era kids.

My sister studied law, and I took and failed the exam for the Indian Institute of Space Technology. Looking back, I'm glad I failed because I am not too keen on building satellites. But since I didn't know that studying Astrophysics was even possible, I went to college for the more "practical" degree of Mechanical Engineering.

In 2015, I earned my Bachelor's degree from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur, but I still could not let go of my dream to become an astronomer. Lucky for me, my parents encouraged me to follow these dreams, no matter how difficult, impractical, or expensive.

So I moved all the way to Austin, Texas, and began my second bachelor's degree - this time, finally, in Astronomy.

UT Tower
The clocktower at the University of Texas at Austin

University of Texas at Austin

I studied Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin beginning in January 2016. I received my Bachelor's degree in Astronomy in December 2018.

I worked with Dr. Caitlin Casey. We studied multiplicity in sources observed with the SCUBA2 instrument, when the same sources were observed with the ALMA telescope.

I also worked for a short while with Dr. Volker Bromm on a theoretical project about dark matter.

(From left)My Master's thesis advisor Dr. Gabriel Brammer, my supervisor Dr. Darach Watson, me, and the external examiner Dr. Thomas Greve at the reception following my Master's defense.

The Cosmic DAWN Center

In November 2023, I obtained a PhD in Astrophysics from the Cosmic DAWN Center at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, under the supervision of Dr. Darach Watson. My PhD thesis included my work on the gravitationally-lensed galaxy A1689-zD1, the ALMA-ALPINE dataset, and the "little red dots" discovered with JWST.
During my time at DAWN, I also worked with Dr. Gabriel Brammer, who co-supervised my Master's and PhD projects. My Master's project involved studying some enigmatic bright and compact objects in the Hubble archival data, which I believe may have been the HST version of the JWST little red dots, but this is yet to be confirmed.

The walkway leading up to the European Southern Observatory (ESO) building. The ESO planetarium is to the right.

European Southern Observatory

In early 2022, I spent three months at the European Southern Observatory in Garching, a 20 minute train ride away from the beautiful city of Münich in Germany.
I worked with Dr. Gergö Popping and Dr. Michele Ginolfi on characterizing the spatial offsets among emissions at various wavelengths from "normal" galaxies that lived between 1 and 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.

CATA and Diego Portales University

In November 2023, I moved to Santiago, Chile to begin my first post-doctoral position with the CATA galaxy evolution group, hosted by Dr. Roberto Assef at the Diego Portales University (UDP).
I am working currently on the incredible ALMA-CRISTAL data with Dr. Manuel Aravena and Dr. Jorge Gonzalez Lopez at UDP, along with Dr. Rodrigo Herrera-Camus from Universidad de Concepción.