Shantanu Basu is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Western University, in London, Ontario, Canada. Shantanu's personal and professional life has taken him across the world several times, with Canada representing his fifth country of residence. He received his PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1993, and held academic positions at Michigan State University and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, in Toronto, before joining Western in 1999. Shantanu is known as an expert in studies of the early stages of star formation and protoplanetary disk formation and evolution. He has made contributions to understanding fragmentation of interstellar molecular clouds, the role of magnetic fields and angular momentum in gravitational collapse and star formation, the origin of luminosity bursts from young stellar objects, and the origin of power-laws in the mass distribution of stars. He is one of the originators of the Migrating Embryo Model for protoplanetary disk evolution, which is a unified scenario for angular momentum transport, binary star and giant planet formation, and the formation of ejected freely floating low mass objects. Shantanu has served as Site Leader for the Sharcnet supercomputing consortium at Western, Director of the Collaborative Program in Theoretical Physics, and Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Western for 2010-15. In 2013, Asteroid 277883 Basu was named after him by the International Astronomical Union.
Tapas K Das works in the field of black hole accretion, Galactic center astrophysics, nonlinear and chaotic behavior in large scale astrophysical fluid flows in strong gravity, and analogue Hawking radiation. He did his Ph.D. from S N Bose National Center, Kolkata, India, and worked as post doctoral fellow at IUCAA, India, Racah Institute of Physics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, UCLA, USA, and Copernicus Astronomical Center, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. Presently he is a faculty member at Harish Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad, India. He served as visiting fellow/visiting faculty at ASIAA, Taiwan, QMW University of London, Academy of Sciences in Czech Republic, Oxford and Cambridge University UK, MPiFr & Bonn University, Sternberg Astronomical Institute Moscow University, and various other institutes in USA and Europe.
Pranawa C. Deshmukh is Professor, Department of Physics, IIT-Tirupati, and a former Head, Deaprtment of Physics, IIT-Madras, and Dean (Sciences) at IIT-Mandi. He has authored over 275 research publications and has made important contributions to the understanding of relativistic and many-body effects in atomic photoionization. Prof. Deshmukh has supervised 17 PhD theses. He has over 30 years teaching experience and has authored an extensive set of online video lectures on atomic physics and classical mechanics. Prof. Deshmukh has been a visiting scientist at multiple institutions in Canada, Europe, and the USA.
Dr Priya Hasan did her Integrated Masters in Physics specialising in Astrophysics from the Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia in 1996. She did her PhD in Astronomy at Osmania University, Hyderabad in 2004. She did post-doctoral research in France and IUCAA, Pune. She was awarded the Women Scientist Award by Department of Science and Technology, New Delhi. The US Consulate, Hyderabad selected her for the International Visitors Leadership Program to visit and deliver lectures at select universities in the US like MIT, Harvard, CalTech, etc. She has presented her work in various conferences in India, Europe and US. Her research interests are in observational astronomy, star formation, star clusters and galaxies. At present she collaborates with groups in India, US, Brazil and Egypt. Priya recently visited The Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, USA on a Summer Internship Program of the International Astronomical Union. She is a member of the International Science Driven Team of the Thirty Meter Telescope. Priya is actively involved in olympiads, public outreach and science popularization programs for children and adults. At present she is an Assistant Professor in Physics at the Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad.
Prof S N Hasan is the Head, Dept of Mathematics, and Dean, Academic Affairs, Maulana Azad National Urdu University. Before joining MANUU he was the Head, Dept. of Astronomy, Osmania University, Hyderabad and Director, Japal-Rangapur Observatories. He completed his MSc and M Phil at the University of Hyderabad and his PhD at the Moscow State University. His research interests are Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy. He has published his research in national and international journals and has more than 20 years of teaching experience. He is actively involved in Olympiads, public outreach and science popularization programs for children and adults.
Parameswaran Ajith is a faculty member at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore where he leads the Astrophysical Relativity group. His research spans various aspects of gravitational wave physics and astronomy, including theoretical modeling of astrophysical sources, gravitational wave data analysis and observational tests of general relativity. He did his PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Albert Einstein Institute and at the California Institute of Technology before joining the faculty of ICTS. He has been a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration since 2004. Ajith is a Ramanujan Fellow and is the head of the Max Planck Partner Group on Astrophysical Relativity and Gravitational Wave Astronomy at ICTS. As a member of the LIGO discovery team, he is the recipient of the 2016 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physic and the 2016 Gruber Cosmology Prize.
Dr. Throop is a Senior Scientist with the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, USA. He received a PhD in Planetary Science from the University of Colorado, USA, in 2000. He is involved with the New Horizons mission to Pluto, working with the visible-IR spectrometer (Ralph) team. Dr. Throop has been a member of the science team for NASA's New Horizons mission since 2003, and was involved in its historic flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015. He is responsible for writing award-winning software for operations planning. He has also been involved with the Cassini mission.s imaging team in the data acquisition and analysis of ring studies in particular. He is a frequent consultant to the USA's NASA and the National Science Foundation. While working at NASA, he managed two of NASA's major scientific research programs. While living in Africa, Dr. Throop worked extensively with rural schools, helping to develop their science programs and inspire the next generation of leaders. He has presented more than 100 lectures for science festivals, planetariums, school groups, and public events across the USA, Mexico, and Africa. Dr. Throop's work has been featured in Science, Nature, Time, The Washington Post, on the History Channel, and National Geographic TV.
After studying Physics and Chemistry at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, Martin Zinke-Allmang completed his PhD at the Max-Planck-Institute for Nuclear Physics. He then joined Bell Laboratories in New Jersey for his postdoctoral work in Condensed Matter Physics. Now a full professor at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, he developed a textbook entitled Physics for the Life Sciences, and focused most recently on an interdisciplinary lecture cycle on Intelligent Life and the Universe. He has supervised 50 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and published more than 70 peer-reviewed articles and reviews in thin film physics.