Rate My Professor Somak Raychaudhury

Somak Raychaudhury is the Vice-Chancellor of Ashoka University, where he serves as Professor of Physics. He holds a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the University of Cambridge, supported by the Isaac Newton Studentship, during which he received the J T Knight prize. He studied Physics at Trinity College, University of Oxford, on an Inlaks Shivdasani scholarship, and graduated from Presidency College, University of Calcutta. His career began as a Smithsonian Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, USA, where he contributed to the High Energy Astrophysics Division and the NASA project for the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. He was a Fellow of Lowell House at Harvard University. In the 1990s, he served as Assistant Professor at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune, followed by over a decade teaching at the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Birmingham, UK.

Returning to India in 2012, Raychaudhury helped transform Presidency College into Presidency University, Kolkata, as Dean of Science, Professor, and Head of Physics. In 2015, he became the fourth Director of IUCAA, one of the world's top astrophysics research institutions. His research spans cosmology and astrophysics, utilizing observations across radio, optical, and X-ray frequencies from ground and space-based telescopes. He has studied exotic stars like black holes and neutron stars in nearby galaxies, including the Milky Way, advanced observational cosmology to determine the Universe's scale and age, and pioneered galaxy supercluster studies, discovering structures such as the Saraswati supercluster. Recently, he has developed machine-learning algorithms for large astronomical datasets and held leading roles in India's mega-science projects like the Thirty Meter Telescope and LIGO-India, co-chairing the committee for India's next decade of astronomy research vision. In 2023, he received the inaugural J.V. Narlikar Lifetime Achievement Award for Physical Sciences from Marathi Vidnyan Parishad for his pioneering contributions.