Rate My Professor Preethi Nair

Preethi Nair is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at The University of Alabama, where she joined the faculty in January 2014 and currently serves as Director of Graduate Recruiting and Admissions. She earned her PhD from the University of Toronto in 2009. As a multi-wavelength observational astronomer, Nair investigates the formation and evolution of galaxies through visual and quantitative analyses of galaxy morphologies. Her research examines the relative roles of merging and secular processes, including bars, rings, and spiral arms, in driving star formation, as well as accreting supermassive black holes or active galactic nuclei (AGN). She employs data mining of large astronomical surveys to explore how galaxies have evolved over cosmic time. Nair supervises graduate and undergraduate students on projects such as constraining properties of dual nuclei and dual AGN in merging galaxies, barred galaxies, and improving automated classifications of visual galaxy morphologies.

Nair participates in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV (SDSS-IV) MaNGA survey, which obtains resolved spectroscopic observations of 10,000 nearby galaxies to study their star formation and mass assembly histories; she serves as science co-chair for this collaboration. Her contributions include characterizing galaxy structures to determine bulge and disk growth since z~1, black hole occupation fractions to constrain supermassive black hole models, and multiwavelength studies of post-merger galaxies. Key publications are 'Automating galaxy morphology classification using k-nearest neighbours' (Mukundan et al., MNRAS, 2024), 'A Multiwavelength Study of Active Galactic Nuclei in Post-merger Remnants' (Li et al., ApJ, 2023), 'Post-starburst properties of post-merger galaxies' (Li et al., MNRAS, 2023), 'Resolved Molecular Gas Observations of MaNGA Post-mergers' (Otter et al., ApJ, 2022), and the '16th Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey' (Ahumada et al., AJ, 2020). Nair has held roles such as member of the NASA Hubble Space Telescope Users Committee (2021–2024), chair of the 2019 regional American Physical Society Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics, and member of its National Organizing Committee (2018–2019). She organizes meetings, participates in career panels, and supports Women in Physics & Astronomy initiatives.