Winter School on Astronomy

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Kengo Tomida (Osaka University, Japan/Princeton University, USA)

Kengo Tomida is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Space Science at Osaka University, Japan. He received his PhD in Astronomy from Graduate University for Advanced Studies / National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in 2012. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and then joined the faculty of Osaka University in 2015. He mainly studies formation of young stars and protoplanetary disks using numerical simulations. He is also a core developer of the Athena++ public magnetohydrodynamic simulation code. He recently received the Young Astronomer Award from the Astronomical Society of Japan and Osaka University Prize for Young Faculty.

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Mousumi Das (Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore)

Mousumi Das is an Associate Professor at Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore. Her research interests include Low Surface Brightness Galaxies , Void Galaxies, End State of Galaxy Mergers : dual AGN, interacting galaxies and Barred Galaxies.

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Shantanu Basu (Western University, Canada)

Shantanu Basu is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Western University, in London, Ontario, Canada. Shantanu's personal and professional life has taken him across the world several times, with Canada representing his fifth country of residence. He received his PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1993, and held academic positions at Michigan State University and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, in Toronto, before joining Western in 1999. Shantanu has made contributions to understanding the fragmentation of interstellar molecular clouds, the role of magnetic fields and angular momentum in gravitational collapse and star formation, the origin of luminosity bursts from young stellar objects, and the origin of power-laws in the mass distribution of stars. He is one of the originators of the Migrating Embryo Model for protoplanetary disk evolution, which is a unified scenario for angular momentum transport, binary star and giant planet formation, and the formation of ejected freely floating low mass objects. In 2013, Asteroid 277883 Basu was named after him by the International Astronomical Union.

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Devendra Ojha (Tata Institute for Fundamental Research, India)

Devendra Ojha is a Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai. He received his PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the Strasbourg University, France in 1994, and held postdoctoral positions at Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune and Institut d.Astrophysique de Paris, France, before joining TIFR as a faculty in 1997. The area of specializations of Devendra encompasses a rather wide range - multiple fields of astrophysics (viz. Galactic Structure, InterStellar Medium, Star Formation), as well as design, development and operation of astronomical instruments. Selected accomplishments in these areas are: discovery of "Thick Disc" population in our Galaxy based on star counts studies. The primacy of this work is that this work appears prominently in the classical text book "Galactic Astronomy" by Binney & Merrifield (1998); discovery of a large number of young brown dwarfs in Galactic star -forming regions which established new insights about the initial mass function; discovery of infrared dark clouds in our Galaxy, and global characterization (luminosity, mass-loss rate) of asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars in the inner bulge from infrared studies. Apart from scientific results Devendra has also played a crucial role in development and successful operation of many infrared instruments. These include the operation of 100 cm TIFR balloon-borne far-infrared telescope; development of instrument for the small satellite mission of ISRO for carrying out Infra-Red Spectroscopic Imaging Survey (IRSIS); development of near-infrared spectrometer and imaging cameras for ground-based Indian telescopes. Devendra has published over 90 papers in major refereed journals and 2 of the papers have got more than 180 citations, while 7 have more than 50 citations. Devendra is serving as Chairperson of the TIFR Balloon Facility Committee since April 2011. He is currently Chairperson of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at TIFR.

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Ajith Parameswaran (International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, India)

Parameswaran Ajith is a faculty member at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore where he leads the Astrophysical Relativity group. His research spans various aspects of gravitational wave physics and astronomy, including theoretical modeling of astrophysical sources, gravitational wave data analysis and observational tests of general relativity. He did his PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Albert Einstein Institute and at the California Institute of Technology before joining the faculty of ICTS. He has been a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration since 2004. Ajith is a Ramanujan Fellow and is the head of the Max Planck Partner Group on Astrophysical Relativity and Gravitational Wave Astronomy at ICTS. As a member of the LIGO discovery team, he is the recipient of the 2016 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physic and the 2016 Gruber Cosmology Prize.

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Gregg Wade (Royal Military College, Canada)

Gregg Wade is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Space Science at the Royal Military College of Canada. He investigates the structure, evolution, origin and impact of magnetic fields in stars. His research concentrates on intermediate and high mass stars, which are the evolutionary progenitors of most white dwarfs, neutron stars and stellar-mass black holes. His current research aims at understanding the origin of and evolution of stellar magnetic fields; the role of magnetic fields in generating spectroscopic activity and in mediating accretion in late stellar formative stages; the interaction of magnetic fields and stellar winds; the factors influencing the stellar rotational angular momentum; and the ultimate impact of internal and external magnetic fields on stellar evolution. Dr. Wade is the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Magnetism in Massive Stars (MiMeS) collaboration, co-PI of the Binarity and Magnetic Interactions in Stars (BinaMIcS) project, and Chair of the international BRITE Executive Science Team (BEST) for the BRITE nanosatellite constellation mission.

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Sayantan Auddy  (Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Taiwan)

Dr. Sayantan Auddy is a Postdoc fellow at Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA). His research areas include Star Formation, Magnetohydrodynamics (MDH) simulation, Molecular Cloud Structure (NPDFs and Filaments).