Indian Priyamvada Natarajan named to Time’s list of most influential people

Priyamvada Natarajan is an astrophysicist.

New Delhi:

Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in 2024 features a range of Indians in various fields. This annual selection recognizes the global impact of people from around the world. The list includes artists, business leaders, actors, athletes, professors, scientists and politicians who have left a significant mark through their work.

Priyamvada Natarajan, professor of India at Yale University, is also on this year’s list.

Here are some facts about Priyamvada Natarajan

1. Priyamvada Natarajan is an astrophysicist and professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University in Connecticut. She is chair of the Department of Astronomy and president of the Women Faculty Forum. Additionally, Ms. Nataranjan is the Director of Yale University’s flagship interdisciplinary Frank Program in the Sciences and Humanities.

2. Ms. Natarajan began her education at Delhi Public School, Delhi, and pursued a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is also a graduate of the MIT Science, Technology, and Society Program in the History and Philosophy of Science. Ms Natarajan later completed her PhD at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, during which time she was awarded the prestigious Isaac Newton Scholarship and was a Fellow of Trinity College.

3. Ms. Natarajan’s research is based on supermassive research black hole, focusing on how they form, grow, and influence their surroundings over time. She uses simulations and models to understand how black holes interact with their host galaxies and the larger universe. Her goal is to discover the fundamental processes of black hole evolution and to use a variety of tools to predict what we can observe from them.

4. In 2022, Ms. Natarajan was awarded the Liberty Science Center Genius Award. She has also received fellowships from the American Physical Society (APS), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute.

5. Ms. Natarajan is the author of Mapping the Sky: Radical Scientific Ideas Revealing the Universe, published in 2016.