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The Nand and Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture Series

Can India Emerge as a Global Science Power?

Sabyasachi Bhattacharya & Priyamvada Natarajan
Thursday, April 18, 2013 - 04:30
Lecture - 4:30 to 6:15 p.m. Penn Law Silverman, 240A (2nd Floor) Reception - 6:15 to 7:15 p.m. Silverman 240 (Kabacoff Reading Room) Silverman Building at Penn Law is accessible from Golkin Hall main entrance at 3501 Sansom Street Philadelphia, PA 19104

A CASI Nand & Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture

Sabyasachi Bhattacharya is a physicist and works on dynamical aspects of disordered condensed matter systems. He is a Distinguished Professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) of which he was the former Director. Professor Bhattacharya received his B.Sc. at the Presidency College, Kolkata, M.Sc. at the University of Delhi, and his Ph.D. at Northwestern University, all in Physics. He conducted post-doctoral research at the National Magnet Laboratory at MIT, University of Rhode Island. He was at the University of Chicago as a James Franck Distinguished Fellow before joining the Exxon Corporate Research Laboratory. He subsequently worked at the NEC Research Institute at Princeton where he was the Chair of the NEC Board of Fellows. Professor Bhattacharya currently serves, among other organizations, on the Editorial Board of the Reports on Progress in Physics, the Technology Advisory Council of BP, the IIT-Council of the Ministry of Human Resource Development and the Council of IIT-Bombay and the Mentor Group of Presidency University, Kolkata. He is a frequent visitor to the New York University, the University of Chicago, the Cavendish Laboratory and the Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Apart from Physics, he is interested in higher education policy in India related specially to science and technology research.

Priyamvada Natarajan is a theoretical astrophysicist and professor at Yale in the Departments of Astronomy and Physics. She is noted for her key contributions to two of the most challenging problems in cosmology: mapping dark matter and tracing the accretion history of black holes. Her work using gravitational lensing techniques has provided a deeper understanding of the granularity of dark matter in clusters of galaxies. She has developed powerful theoretical models to describe the assembly and accretion history of black holes. In addition to her position at Yale, Dr. Natarajan holds the Sophie and Tycho Brahe Professorship of the Dark Cosmology Centre, Niels Bohr Institute, at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark and has been recently elected to an Honorary Professorship for life at the University of Delhi in India. Her research work has been featured in many documentaries, on Nova, and in many BBC series, the History Channel and on Japan’s NHK network. Her discoveries and significant papers have been featured in newspapers around the world and extensively on the web and in news outlets like BBC News, NPR, MSNBC, USA Today, India Abroad, and CNN. She is a regular Op-Ed contributor to one of India’s largest national daily newspapers, the Hindustan Times, and has published pieces in the Huffington Post and the Washington Post. Dr. Natarajan is the current chair of the Women Faculty Forum (WFF) at Yale. She is deeply interested in Gender Parity issues in the Academy. Along with Judith Resnik and Reva Siegel at the Yale Law School, she co-organized the first Gruber conference titled Parity as Practice: The Politics of Equality in 2012. They will be hosting the second Gruber conference titled “Contesting Gender Inequalities” this year. Dr. Natarajan has a Masters from MIT’s Program in Science, Technology & Society and was enrolled in MIT’s Technology & Policy Program. She received her Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Cambridge, England.

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