Shrinivas Kulkarni

Shrinivas Kulkarni
Kulkarni in 2016
Born (1956-10-04) 4 October 1956
Kurundwad, Maharashtra, India
Alma mater
Awards
  • FRS[1] (2001)
  • US NAS (2003)
  • Indian Academy of Sciences (2012)
  • Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2016)
  • Helen B. Warner Prize (1991)
  • NSF Waterman Prize (1992)
  • Jansky Prize (2002)
  • Dan David Prize (2017)
  • Shaw Prize (2024)
Scientific career
FieldsAstronomy
  • Interstellar Medium
  • Pulsars
  • Millisecond Pulsars,
  • Brown Dwarf
  • Soft Gamma-ray Repeaters
  • Gamma-ray Bursts
  • Optical Transients
InstitutionsCalifornia Institute of Technology
Doctoral advisor
Notable students

Shrinivas Ramchandra Kulkarni (born 4 October 1956) is an Indian American astronomer.[2] He is a professor of astronomy and planetary science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech),[3] and was the director of the Caltech Optical Observatory (COO), overseeing the Palomar and Keck among other telescopes.[3]

Early life and education

Shrinivas Ramchandra Kulkarni was born on 4 October 1956 in the small town of Kurundwad in Maharashtra, into a Hindu family. His father, Dr. R. H. Kulkarni, was a surgeon based in Hubballi and his mother, Vimala Kulkarni, was a home-maker. He is one of four children and has three sisters, Sunanda Kulkarni, Sudha Murthy (educator, author, philanthropist and wife of one of the co-founders of Infosys) and Jaishree Deshpande (wife of Gururaj Deshpande).[4][5][6]

Kulkarni and his sisters grew up in Hubballi, Karnataka, and received their schooling at local schools there.[2][4][7][5] He obtained his MS in applied physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1978 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1983.[3]

Career

In 1987, Kulkarni obtained a position as faculty at the California Institute of Technology.[3] 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.

Kulkarni started off his career as a radio astronomer. He studied the Milky Way Galaxy using HI absorption under the guidance of his advisor Carl Heiles, and observed its four arms.[8]

He discovered the first millisecond pulsar called PSR B1937+21[9] with Donald Backer and colleagues, while he was a graduate student. In 1986, he found the first optical counterpart of binary pulsars,[10] while he was a Millikan Fellow at California Institute of Technology. He was instrumental in discovery of the first globular cluster pulsar in 1987[11] 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.[12][13] This discovery eventually led to the understanding that neutron stars with extremely high magnetic field called magnetars are the soft gamma-ray repeaters.[14]

Caltech-NRAO team which he led showed in 1997 that gamma-ray bursts came from extra-galactic sources,[15] and identified optical counterparts.[16] 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.[17]

His recent work involved Palomar Transient Factory which has succeeded in identifying the new groups of optical transients such as superluminous supernovae,[18] calcium-rich supernovae,[19] and luminous red novae.[20][21]

Awards and honours

Some of the awards he has received include the following:

In 2015, he received an honorary doctorate from Radboud University in the Netherlands.[27] In 2024, he was awarded the Shaw Prize in Astronomy.[28][29]

Services to the field

Kulkarni has been the Jury Chair for the Infosys Prize for the discipline of Physical Sciences since 2009.[30] The prize is awarded by the Infosys Foundation, whose founder is Kulkarni's brother-in-law, Narayana Murthy.

Kulkarni is a member of four national academies. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, London, in 2001,[1][31] a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2003,[32] an honorary fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences in 2012,[33] and a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences on 12 September 2016.[34][35]

References

  1. ^ a b "Shrinivas Kulkarni". The Royal Society. Retrieved 29 November 2016.
  2. ^ a b Kembhavi, Ajit (2001). "An accomplished observer". Frontline.
  3. ^ a b c d "Shrinivas R. (Shri) Kulkarni". Caltech Geology and Planetary Science. Archived from the original on 17 May 2017. Retrieved 29 March 2017.
  4. ^ a b "Karnataka Online Teachers Data Base". Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences Karnataka. 2012.
  5. ^ a b Kamala Bhatt (15 July 2002). "What Went Wrong?".
  6. ^ "Two daughters who made India proud". www.leadcampus.org. 9 March 2017. Retrieved 29 March 2017.
  7. ^ "A star called Kulkarni". rediff.com. 19 August 2003.
  8. ^ Kulkarni, Shrinivas R. (1983). Studies of galactica HI in 21-centimeter absorption (PhD Thesis: UC Berkeley). Berkeley, California. Bibcode:1984PhDT.........4K.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  9. ^ Backer, D. C.; Kulkarni, S. R.; Heiles, C.; Davis, M. M.; Goss, W. M. (1982), "A millisecond pulsar", Nature, 300 (5893): 615–618, Bibcode:1982Natur.300..615B, doi:10.1038/300615a0, S2CID 4247734
  10. ^ Kulkarni, S. R. (1986), "Optical Identification of Binary Pulsars - Implication for Magnetic Field Decay in Neutron Stars" (PDF), Astrophysical Journal, 306: L85, Bibcode:1986ApJ...306L..85K, doi:10.1086/184711
  11. ^ Lyne, A. G.; Brinklow, A.; Middleditch, J.; Kulkarni, S. R.; Backer, D. C.; Clifton, T. R. (1987), "The Discovery of a Millisecond Pulsar in the Globular Cluster M28)", Nature, 328 (6129): 399–401, Bibcode:1987Natur.328..399L, doi:10.1038/328399a0, S2CID 4333586
  12. ^ Kulkarni, S. R.; Frail, D. A. (1993), "Identification of a supernova remnant coincident with the soft gamma-ray repeater SGR 1806-20", Nature, 365 (6441): 33–35, Bibcode:1993Natur.365...33K, doi:10.1038/365033a0, S2CID 4357312
  13. ^ Murakami, T.; Tanaka, Y.; Kulkarni, S. R.; et al. (1994), "X-ray dentification of a supernova the soft gamma-ray repeater 1806-20", Nature, 368 (6467): 127–129, Bibcode:1994Natur.368..127M, doi:10.1038/368127a0, S2CID 4350956
  14. ^ Kulkarni, S. R.; Thompson, Christopher (1998), "Neutron Stars: A star powered by magnetism", Nature, 393 (6682): 215–216, Bibcode:1998Natur.393..215K, doi:10.1038/30357, S2CID 205000444
  15. ^ Metzgar, M. R.; Djorgovski, S. G.; Kulkarni, S. R.; et al. (1997), "Spectral constraints on the redshift of the optical counterpart to the gamma-ray burst of 8 May 1997", Nature, 387 (6636): 878–880, Bibcode:1997Natur.387..878M, doi:10.1038/43132
  16. ^ Djorgovski, S. G.; Metzgar, M. R.; Kulkarni, S. R.; et al. (1997), "The optical counterpart to the gamma-ray burst GRB970508", Nature, 387 (6636): 876–878, Bibcode:1997Natur.387..876D, doi:10.1038/43126
  17. ^ Nakajima, T.; Oppenheimer, B. R.; Kulkarni, S. R.; Golimowski, D. A.; Matthews, K.; Durrance, S. (1995), "Discovery of a Cool Brown Dwarf", Nature, 378 (6556): 463–465, Bibcode:1995Natur.378..463N, doi:10.1038/378463a0, S2CID 4351772
  18. ^ Quimby, R. M.; Kulkarni, S. R.; Kasliwal, M. M.; et al. (2011), "Hydrogen-poor super luminous stellar explosions", Nature, 474 (7352): 487–489, arXiv:0910.0059, Bibcode:2011Natur.474..487Q, doi:10.1038/nature10095, PMID 21654747, S2CID 4333823
  19. ^ Kasliwal, M. M.; Kulkarni, S. R.; Arcavi, I.; et al. (2012), "Calcium-Rich Transients in the Remote Outskerts of Galaxies", Astrophysical Journal, 755 (2): 161, arXiv:1111.6109, Bibcode:2012ApJ...755..161K, doi:10.1088/0004-637X/755/2/161, S2CID 32808402
  20. ^ Rau, A.; Kulkarni, S. R.; Ofek, E. O.; Yan, L. (2007), "Spitzer Observations of the New Luminous Red Nova M85 OT2006-1", Astrophysical Journal, 659 (2): 1536–1540, arXiv:astro-ph/0612161, Bibcode:2007ApJ...659.1536R, doi:10.1086/512672, S2CID 8913778
  21. ^ Kasliwal, M. M.; Kulkarni, S. R.; Arcavi, I.; et al. (2011), "PTF 10fqs: A Luminous Red Nova in the Spiral Galaxy Messier 99", Nature, 730 (2): 134, arXiv:1111.6109, Bibcode:2012ApJ...755..161K, doi:10.1088/0004-637X/755/2/161, S2CID 32808402
  22. ^ "Alan T. Waterman Award Recipients, 1976 - present". American Astronomical Society. Archived from the original on 2 March 2015. Retrieved 29 November 2016.
  23. ^ "Shrinivas Kulkarni received the 1991 Helen B. Warner Prize of the American Astronomical Society.", Physics Today, 44 (6): f129, 1991, Bibcode:1991PhT....44f.129., doi:10.1063/1.2810153
  24. ^ "Jansky Lectureship". science.nrao.edu. 24 August 2016.
  25. ^ "Caltech Astronomer Receives 2017 Dan David Prize". www.caltech.edu. 10 February 2017.
  26. ^ "Laureates 2017". www.dandavidprize.org. Retrieved 27 March 2017.
  27. ^ "Honorary Doctorate for astronomer Shrinivas Kulkarni". Retrieved 2 June 2017.
  28. ^ "The Shaw Prize in Astronomy 2024". shawprize.org.
  29. ^ "Shaw Prize 2024". shawprize.org.
  30. ^ "Jury Chairs 2009". Infosys Science Foundation. Archived from the original on 28 March 2017. Retrieved 29 March 2017.
  31. ^ "The Royal Society inducts Shrinivas Kulkarni". rediff.com. 2001.
  32. ^ "Member Directory". National Academy of Science, US. Retrieved 25 March 2017.
  33. ^ "Honorary Fellows". Indian Academy of Science. Retrieved 25 March 2017.
  34. ^ "KNAW kiest zestien nieuwe leden" (in Dutch). Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 25 March 2017.
  35. ^ "Shrnivas Kulkarni". Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 25 March 2017.
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