Priyamvada Natarajan

A theoretical physicist and lecturer in the Department of Astronomy at Yale University, she is engaged in research on cosmology, gravitational lensing, and supermassive black holes. She obtained a PhD in Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge and continued her brilliant academic career at Harvard University and the prestigious Dark Cosmology Center of the Niels Bohr Institute (University of Copenhagen). Her internationally renowned research in theoretical physics, which has received many prizes, is notable for mapping dark matter clump distributions in galaxies of the universe. In academia and as president of the Womens Faculty Forum, Natarajan has also been concerned about issues related with institutional change and gender parity in universities. She has written numerous widely acclaimed articles in academic publications and has recently published the book Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos (Yale University Press, 2016), in which she provides an overview and description of the great scientific theories and cosmological discoveries of the last century which have shaped our knowledge of the universe.