BENGALURU: Professor Tarun Souradeep has assumed charge as Director, Raman Research Institute (RRI), from interim director Prof Madhavan Varadarajan on Thursday.
Prof Souradeep’s area of expertise is cosmology and gravitational wave (GW) physics and astronomy, areas in which he made important contributions and succeeded in creating a sustained Indian effort addressing issues at par with international research. The impact of the Indian team led by him is widely recognized, both in the field of cosmology with frontline Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments and the emergent field of GW astronomy.
He is the spokesperson (Science) for Laser Interferometer Gravitational Waves Observatory (LIGO)-India and Member Secretary of LIGO-India Scientific Management Board, besides being one of the lead proposers of the national mega-science, LIGO-India project, in 2011.
Before coming to RRI, Prof Souradeep was a professor and chair of the Physics Department at the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune. He got his Ph.D. from Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune and was a postdoctoral fellow at Kansas State University’s High Energy Physics Group and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics.
He is a recipient of various awards including DST Swarnajayanti Fellowship, Gruber Cosmology Prize 2016 and 2018 and the Special Breakthrough Prize for 2016. He is also a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the Indian Academy of Sciences, besides being elected to the fellowship of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation.