| Priya Natarajan | |
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Photograph of Priya Natarajan taken at KITP, Santa Barbara
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| Fields | Cosmology, Theoretical astrophysics |
| Institutions | Yale University (Professor) |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge, Trinity College, Institute of Astronomy |
Priyamvada (Priya) Natarajan is a professor in the departments of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University. She is noted for key contributions to two of the most challenging problems in cosmology: mapping dark matter and dark energy as well as 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 theoretical models to describe the assembly and accretion history of black holes.
Currently, she is a visiting professor at the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA. She is also enrolled as a graduate student (Spring 2011) at the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT. She lives between Cambridge, MA and New Haven, CT.
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Priya Natarajan was born in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu in India to academic parents, Venkatesa and Lalitha Natarajan. She is one of three children. Her father is an eminent educationist (although he started his career in civil engineering). He has pioneered educational testing, evaluation, and assessment in India. Her mother is a sociologist and is the author of several books. Priya grew up in Delhi, India and studied at Delhi Public School, R. K. Puram.
Priya has undergraduate degrees in Physics and Mathematics from M.I.T. She is also interested in the history and philosophy of science as well as technology and public policy and was enrolled in the M.I.T. Program in Science, Technology & Society and the M.I.T. Program in Technology and Public Policy from 1991 to 1993. She did her graduate work in theoretical astrophysics at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge in England, where she was a member of Trinity College and was elected to a Title A Research Fellowship that she held from 1997 to 2003. Prior to coming to Yale, she was a visiting postdoctoral fellow for a few months at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto, Canada.
Priya has done extensive work in the following fields:
Priya was awarded the Emeline Conland Bigelow Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University in 2008. In 2009, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Priya was also the 2009 recipient of the India Abroad Foundation's "Face of the Future " Award and the recipient of the award for academic achievement from the Global Organization for the People of Indian Origin (GOPIO). Priya was elected a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2009, the American Physical Society in 2010, and the Explorers Club in 2010. She was awarded a JILA (Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics) Fellowship in 2010. In January, 2011 she was awarded an India Empire NRI award for Achievement in the Sciences in New Delhi, India. She will be the Caroline Herschel Distinguished Visitor at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore for 2011-2012. In addition to her current appointments at Yale and Harvard, she also holds the Sophie and Tycho Brahe Professorship, Dark Cosmology Center, Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
She is on the scientific advisory board of ScienceNow at NOVA.