Two ICTS students, one former and one current, have received prestigious recognitions for their outstanding research.
Former ICTS student Dr. Aditya Vijaykumar, now a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), received two significant awards for his PhD thesis. He received the 2024 Justice Oak Award for Outstanding Thesis in Astronomy by the Astronomical Society of India and the 2024 V V Narlikar Best Thesis Award by the Indian Association for General Relativity and Gravitation.
Dr. Vijaykumar completed his PhD thesis, ‘Exploring gravity, astrophysics, and cosmology with gravitational waves’, under the guidance of Prof. P. Ajith, ICTS-TIFR. He is presently based at the University of Toronto, Canada. “I feel really floored by the awards,” he said.
Prof. Ajith’s present PhD student, Souvik Jana, received an Honorable Mention in the Young Astronomer Award for the Best Publication by the Astronomical Society of India for the paper ‘Cosmography Using Strongly Lensed Gravitational Waves from Binary Black Holes’ published in the Physical Review Letters in 2023. “I am deeply honoured to receive this recognition for our work from the Astronomical Society of India. It is very encouraging,” said Mr. Jana.
In this work, Mr. Jana and his collaborators proposed a new method to measure cosmic expansion. Presently, they are extending this approach to different models of dark matter.
On the other hand, Dr. Vijaykumar focuses on using gravitational-wave transients to learn about astrophysics, cosmology, and fundamental physics. To enable this, he develops optimal data analysis techniques. Some of his recent work has shed light on the host environments of compact binary mergers and how assumptions about the host environments could impact cosmological constraints obtained from these sources.
ICTS congratulates both Mr. Jana and Dr. Vijaykumar for their excellent work and Prof. P. Ajith for his superb mentoring. “Best wishes to all of them for continuing their stellar performance in coming years,” said Prof. Rajesh Gopakumar, Centre Director, ICTS-TIFR.