Distinguished Lecture - Unveiling the Dark Universe

Professor of Astronomy and of Physics, Yale University

Priyamvada Natarajan’s research is focused on exotica in the Universe—dark matter, dark energy and black holes. Priya’s research has focused on confronting and testing theoretical ideas  with observational data in astrophysics. She is noted for seminal contributions to two of the most challenging problems in cosmology:  mapping the distribution of dark matter and tracing the growth history of black holes. Her work using gravitational lensing has provided a deeper understanding of the granularity of dark matter in clusters of galaxies and offers a novel way to unravel the nature of dark matter. Natarajan also works on the assembly and accretion history of black holes – and has made key contributions to the formation, fueling and feedback from them. One of the proposers of the direct collapse channel for the formation of early massive black hole seeds, she developed the framework to embed them into the standard galaxy  formation and assembly in CDM models. Her work has enabled making concrete predictions for upcoming and future missions – namely, James Webb, Nancy Roman and LISA.

A professor in the Departments of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University, Priyamvada is also the Director of the Franke Programme in Science and the Humanities. Till recently she was the Chair of the Division of Astrophysics of the American Physical Society and currently serves on the National Astronomy & Astrophysics Advisory Committee (AAAC) that advises NASA, NSF and DoE. She is also an active member of the NASA LISA Science Team. Recipient of many awards and honors in recognition of her contributions to science, including the Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships, she also holds the Sophie and Tycho Brahe Professorship at the Dark Centre, Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark and an Honorary Professorship at the University of Delhi, India. 

Priyamvada has undergraduate degrees in Physics and Mathematics from MIT.  She is also interested in the history and philosophy of science as well as technology and public policy and was enrolled in the MIT Programme in Science, Technology & Society, where she was awarded a Master’s Degree (S.M.), and the MIT Programme in Technology and Public Policy.  She did her graduate work in theoretical astrophysics at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge in England, where she was a member of Trinity College and was elected to a Title A Research Fellowship. She was the first woman in Astrophysics to be elected a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Deeply invested in the public understanding of science, she serves on the Advisory Board of NOVA ScienceNow and Scientific American. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed book Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas that Reveal the Cosmos. She and her work have been featured in many news outlets including the New York Times, Quartz, BBC, CNN, New York Review of Books, PBS-NOVA, NPR, Science Friday and Quanta Magazine to name a few.