Khagol # 124 - Oct 2020

| KHAG L | No. 124 - OCTOBER 2020 | 04 Welcome to … Krishnakanta Bhattacharya, who has joined IUCAAas a Post-doctoral Fellow in September 2020. He has obtained his PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati in August 2020. During his PhD, he has worked on several aspects of gravity, such as black hole thermodynamics, phase transition, fluid-gravity correspondence, etc. His primary interest lies in theoretical aspects of general relativity, QFT in curved spacetime. He was also associated with California State University, Fresno, for six months as a Fulbright visiting researcher. At IUCAA, he will work on several aspects of general relativity, and also on Fermionic fields in curved spacetime. Souradeep Bhattacharya , who has joined IUCAA as a Post-doctoral Fellow in September 2020. He carried out his undergraduate studies at BITS, Pilani, with a dual-degree in Physics along with Electrical and Electronics Engineering. During this time, he had his first research experience as a summer intern at IUCAA. Also, he had summer internships at the University ofAlberta, Canada; and National Central University, Taiwan. His early research work focused on open cluster morphology, blue stragglers, and X-ray sources in globular clusters. Till early 2020, he was an IMPRS PhD student at the European SouthernObservatory (ESO), Garching, Germany. His PhD research focused on using Planetary Nebulae as discrete tracers to unveil the recent formation history of theAndromeda Galaxy (M31).At IUCAA, he will primarily work on the archaeology of nearby galaxies using discrete tracers to understand the build-up of galaxies at different mass scales. He is generally interested in stellar populations in galaxies and their dynamics. Annu Jacob, who has joined IUCAAas a Post-doctoral Fellow in October 2020. She did her integrated MTech – PhD in Astronomical Instrumentation from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics(IIA), Bengaluru, in collaboration with the University of Calcutta. Her doctoral thesis was on Optimum Design and Development of Segmented Mirror Telescope Optics and Phasing System. Her primary interest lies in developing new optical instrumentation technology, and utilizing it to do cutting edge research inAstronomy andAstrophysics. During her PhD, she did optical design and analysis for the 1m class prototype segmented mirror telescope being developed by IIA, and also for the envisioned 10m class National Large Optical Telescope(NLOT), which is indented to be a technological asset for the entire Indian astronomical community. She also developed technology for phasing of the segmentedmirrors tomake themwork like amonolith.At IUCAA, she is working onDevastal Optical Telescope Integral Field Spectrograph (DOTIFS), on assembly, calibration, and testing of various spectrograph subsystems, thus realizing a powerful back-end instrument of the current largest optical telescope of India. Sushma Kurapati, who has joined IUCAAas a Post-doctoral Fellow in July 2020. She has obtained her PhD from the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, Pune in 2020. Her primary research interests are related to galaxy formation and evolution. In particular, she is interested in understanding the evolutionary processes that shape the structure and dynamics of galaxies. She mainly uses neutral hydrogen (HI) 21 cm observations to trace various interactions, mergers, and accretion, and thereby understand how galaxies acquire and lose their gas in various environments. In her PhD thesis, she used HI kinematics to derive the rotation curves to obtain properties such as angular momentum and dark matter distribution in dwarf galaxies. Currently, she is working on ultra-diffuse galaxies to test their formation scenarios.