Ray Jayawardhana

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Ray Jayawardhana is a renowned astronomer at the University of Toronto and an award-winning science writer. His primary research areas include the formation and early evolution of stars, brown dwarfs and planets.

As a graduate student at Harvard, he led one of the two teams that discovered a dusty disk around the young star HR 4796A with a large inner hole, possibly carved out by planet formation processes. In recent years, his group has played a key role in establishing that young brown dwarfs undergo a T Tauri phase, similar to young Sun-like stars, with evidence for dusty disks and signatures of disk accretion and outflow. Disks have now also been found around sub-brown dwarfs or planemos.

Jayawardhana is the author of Star Factories: The Birth of Stars and Planets (Steck Vaughn, 2000) and a contributing editor to Astronomy magazine. He is the recipient of a Science Writing Award for a Scientist (2003) from the American Institute of Physics. His popular articles have appeared in many publications, including The Economist, Scientific American, New Scientist, Sky and Telescope, Muse, Science and the Times Higher Education Supplement.

[edit] Background

Jayawardhana was born and raised in Sri Lanka, and pursued his higher education in the United States. He received his B.S. degree from Yale in 1994 and his PhD from Harvard in 2000. He was a Miller Research Fellow at UC Berkeley for two years and an assistant professor at the University of Michigan for two years, before moving to Toronto.