Priya Natarajan

Astrophysicist and Author, Yale University

Priyamvada Natarajan is an astrophysicist and Professor in the Departments of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University. Her research focus lies in understanding the dark side of the universe: dark matter, dark energy and black holes and the role they play in structuring their universe. In addition to her academic position at Yale, she also currently holds the Sophie and Tycho Brahe Professorship of the Dark Cosmology Center, Niels Bohr Institute, at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark as well as an Honorary Professorship for life at the University of Delhi, India. She is the recipient of many awards and honors including the Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships, in recognition of her seminal research contributions. Priya was born in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu in India to academic parents and grew up in Delhi, India. She has undergraduate degrees in Physics and Mathematics from M.I.T. and did her graduate work in theoretical astrophysics at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge in England, where she was the first woman to be elected a fellow in Astrophysics at Trinity College, Cambridge. She also holds a Master’s degree in the history and philosophy of science from M.I.T. She is the author of a critically acclaimed book, Mapping the Heavens: Radical Scientific Ideas that Reveal the Cosmos and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. Deeply invested in interdisciplinary scholarship, she serves as the current Director of the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities at Yale.”