Name Shrinivas Kulkarni Siblings Sudha Murthy | Nieces Akshata Murthy Nephews Rohan Murthy | |
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Astronomy on the cusp public talk by shrinivas kulkarni
Shrinivas R. Kulkarni (born 1956) is an astronomer born in India. He is currently a professor of astronomy and planetary science at California Institute of Technology, and the director of Caltech Optical Observatory (COO) at California Institute of Technology who oversees Palomar and Keck among other telescopes. The success of his astronomical research is seen by 63 Nature Letters, 7 Science Letters, and total of 479 refereed scientific articles that bear his name by the end of 2015 according to ADS. Recognizing his contribution to astronomy, he was awarded the Dan David Prize in 2017.
Contents
- Astronomy on the cusp public talk by shrinivas kulkarni
- Prof Shrinivas Kulkarni Future Time Dimension
- Background
- Key Discoveries
- References
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Prof. Shrinivas Kulkarni (Future Time Dimension)
Background
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Shrinivas R. Kulkarni was born in a small town of Kurundwad on October 4, 1956 in southern Maharashtra as the one of four children of the surgeon Dr. R. H. Kulkarni and Vimala Kulkarni, and received his early education in Hubballi, Karnataka India. He obtained his MS in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1978, and his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983. and became a faculty member at California Institute of Technology in 1987
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He is a member of 4 national academies around the globe. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, London, in 2001, a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2003, an honorary fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences in 2012, and a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences on September 12, 2016. In 2015 he received an honorary doctorate from Radboud University
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He has received many awards including the NSF's Alan T. Waterman Award in 1992, Helen B. Warner Prize from the American Astronomical Society in 1991, Jansky Prize in 2002 and Dan David Prize in 2017.
He has mentored 64 young scholars by the end of 2016 according to his website. He has been the Jury Chair for the Infosys Prize for the discipline of Physical Sciences since 2009. Kulkarni is the brother of Sunanda Kulkarni, Sudha Murthy, and Jaishree Deshpande.
Key Discoveries
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Kulkarni is known for making key discoveries that open new sub-fields within astronomy, using wide range of wavelength in observation. ADS shows that his papers cover following fields: (1) HI absorption studies of Milky Way Galaxy, (2) pulsars, millisecond pulsars, and globular cluster pulsars, (3) brown dwarfs and other sub-stellar objects, (4) soft gamma-ray repeaters, (5) gamma-ray bursts, and (6) optical transients. He made significant contributions in these sub-fields of astronomy.
He started off his career as a radio astronomer. He studied Milky Way Galaxy using HI absorption under the guidance of his advisor Carl Heiles, and observed its four arms. The review articles he wrote with Carl Heiles have been highly cited in the field of interstellar medium.
He discovered the first millisecond pulsar called PSR B1937+21 with Donald Backer and colleagues, while he was a graduate student. In 1986, he found the first optical counterpart of binary pulsars, while he was a Millikan Fellow at California Institute of Technology. He was instrumental in discovery of the first globular cluster pulsar in 1987 using a supercomputer.
With Dale Frail at NRAO and Toshio Murakami and his colleagues at ISAS (predecessor of JAXA that was led by Yasuo Tanaka at that time) Kulkarni showed that soft gamma-ray repeaters are neutron stars associated with supernova remnants. This discovery eventually led to the understanding that neutron stars with extremely high magnetic field called magnetars are the soft gamma-ray repeaters.
Caltech-NRAO team which he led showed in 1997 that gamma-ray bursts came from extra-galactic sources, and identified optical counterparts. Their research initiated the detailed studies of the sources of gamma-ray bursts along with the European team led by Jan van Paradijs.
He was also a member of the Caltech team that observed the first irrefutable brown dwarf in 1994 that orbited around a star called Gliese 229.
His recent work involved Palomar Transient Factory which has succeeded in identifying the new groups of optical transients such as superluminous supernova, calcium-rich supernova, and luminous red nova.