Shrinivas Kulkarni

Shrinivas Ramchandra " Shri " Kulkarni (* October 4, 1956 in Kurundwad, Maharashtra ) is an Indian- American astronomer. He is McArthur Professor of Astronomy and Professor of Planetary Science at Caltech.

Life

He went to Hubballi in Karnataka to school and studied physics at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi with the Masters degree in Physics in 1978. In 1983 he was a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. He was Robert Millikan Fellow and Assistant Professor of Astronomy from 1987 and later became a professor at Caltech. He is since 2006 director of optical observatories of Caltech, including Mount Palomar and Keck observatories. From 2004 he is director of the NASA Exoplanet Science Center.

Kulkarni is observational astronomer who especially compact objects ( neutron stars, gamma ray bursts ) and transient phenomena (such exoplanets with interferometric and adaptive optical techniques ) observed in a wide range of wavelengths. He started as a radio astronomer and examined interstellar gas, where he discovered four arms of the Milky Way. 1982 he was involved in the discovery of the first millisecond pulsar (PSR B1937 21) ​​, found the first optical images of pulsar binary systems and the first pulsar in a globular cluster. Kulkarni showed that soft gamma-ray repeaters are remnants of supernovas and he consolidated with colleagues the combination of gamma -ray bursts with supernova remnants. In 1997 he showed his team that gamma -ray bursts come from outside our Milky Way and he was able to identify optical counterparts. He was part of the team that found the first brown dwarf ( Gliese 229).

He's (PST) involved Palomar Transient Factory currently at an automated wide-angle observation of the sky by optically variable, and transient sources on Mount Palomar ( Oschin telescope and 1.5 m Telescope) in 2009. He is also working to improve other astronomical observation techniques.

2000/2001 he was a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Harris Lecturer ), 1995 Miller Visiting Professor at Berkeley, 1992 Visiting scientist at Arecibo and 1993 at ISAS in Japan. In 2003 he was Lecturer Salpeter at Cornell University.

He was since 2000 involved in the planning of the 2010 discontinued Space Interferometry Mission ( a satellite in particular to explore planets around distant suns ).

In 1992 he received the Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation and the 1991 Helen B. Warner Prize of the American Astronomical Society. He was Packard Fellow, Sloan Fellow and received a 1988 Presidential Young Investigator Award. In 2002, he held the Karl G. Jansky Lecture (The brightest explosions in the universe ). He is since 2003 a member of the National Academy of Sciences, since 1994, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society from 2001. In 2011 he was made an honorary member of the Indian Academy of Sciences.

His sister is the computer scientist Sudha Murthy. He is an American citizen.