Ray Jayawardhana

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Ray Jayawardhana
Education	Harvard University, Yale University, Royal College, Colombo, St. John's College, Nugegoda
Occupation	Astronomer, Author
Known for	exoplanets, brown dwarfs, planet formation, science writing
Website
http://www.rayjay.net

Ray Jayawardhana is an astronomer at the University of Toronto, where he holds a Canada Research Chair in Observational Astrophysics, and an award-winning science writer. His primary research areas include the formation and early evolution of stars, brown dwarfs and planets.^[1]

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.^[2] 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. In September 2008, he and his collaborators reported the first direct image and spectroscopy of a likely extra-solar planet around a normal star.^[3]

Jayawardhana is the author of Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe (Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG)), Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life beyond our Solar System (Princeton and HarperCollins, 2011) and Star Factories: The Birth of Stars and Planets (Steck Vaughn, 2001). His popular articles have appeared in many publications, including The Economist, The New York Times, Scientific American, New Scientist, Sky and Telescope, Muse, Science and the Times Higher Education Supplement.^[4] He is also known for organizing innovative science outreach programs such as the CoolCosmos astronomy poster campaign on the Toronto Transit Commission.^[5]

Background

Jayawardhana was born and raised in Sri Lanka. He was educated at the St. John's College, Nugegoda^[6] and the prestigious Royal College Colombo and pursued his higher education in the United States.^[7] He received his BS degree from Yale in 1994 and his PhD from Harvard in 2000.^[8] He was a Miller Research Fellow at UC Berkeley^[9] for two years and an assistant professor at the University of Michigan^[10] for two years, before moving to Toronto.

In early 2014, Ray Jayawardhana was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Science at York University.^[11]

Awards

Jayawardhana has received the Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics in 2003, the Vainu Bappu Gold Medal of the Astronomical Society of India in 2004, and the Early Researcher Award from the Government of Ontario in 2006. He was named Canada Research Chair in Observational Astrophysics in 2008.^[12] He was a Dean's Lecturer at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2005 and a Galileo Lecturer^[13] for the Canadian Astronomical Society in 2009. He held a E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship,^[14]^[15]"awarded to enhance the career development of outstanding and highly promising university faculty who are earning a strong international reputation for original research",^[16] from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, presented by Prime Minister Stephen Harper at a ceremony in Ottawa on March 16, 2009.^[17] He has also been named to Canada's Top 40 Under 40.^[18]

References

External links

Authority control	VIAF: 49471070 ISNI: 0000 0000 1935 2701

Persondata
Name	Jayawardhana, Ray
Alternative names
Short description	Canadian-Sri Lankan astronomer
Date of birth
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death

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