Meet Your Instructors
Prof. Sayan Kar
Sayan Kar is a Professor in the Department of Physics at IIT Kharagpur. He completed his BSc (Hons) from Visva Bharati, Santiniketan, and his MSc and PhD (1994) from IIT Kanpur. After postdoctoral research at several institutions, including IUCAA (1996–1998), he joined IIT Kharagpur in 1998. His research interests span general relativity, modified theories of gravity, and gravitational waves. He has also contributed to physics pedagogy through articles on classical and quantum mechanics, optics, and gravitational physics.
Prof. Nikhil Mukund
Nikhil Mukund is an Assistant Professor at IUCAA, Pune. He works primarily on precision interferometry, detector commissioning, and intelligent instrumentation for current and future gravitational-wave observatories. Before joining IUCAA in 2026, he was a Research Scientist at the MIT LIGO Laboratory, where he worked on laser-beam control and the transfer of embedded-AI techniques from tabletop optical systems to LIGO-scale subsystems.
Prof. Chandrakant Mishra
Chandrakant Mishra is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at IIT Madras. He obtained his PhD in 2013 from the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore under the supervision of Prof. Bala Iyer at the Raman Research Institute. Following postdoctoral positions at IISER Trivandrum and ICTS Bangalore, he joined IIT Madras in 2016. His research interests cover analytical relativity, gravitational wave theory and data analysis, modelling of coalescing compact binaries using numerical and perturbative approaches, tests of general relativity, and compact star astrophysics.
Prof. Arunava Mukherjee
Arunava Mukherjee began his academic foundation in high-energy astrophysics, specialising in accreting neutron star and black hole systems within low-mass X-ray binaries. He is the lead developer of BinaryWeave, a dedicated pipeline designed for the direct detection of continuous gravitational waves from spinning neutron stars in known binary systems. At SINP, his research group investigates the physics of dense and extreme matter, with a specific focus on the equation of state and fundamental physics of neutron stars, and the integration of machine learning methodologies into these frameworks.
Prof. Anand Sengupta
Anand Sengupta is a faculty member in the Department of Physics at IIT Gandhinagar, where he works on gravitational-wave physics, data analysis, and astrophysics. He received his PhD from IUCAA, Pune in 2005, followed by postdoctoral positions at Cardiff University and the LIGO Laboratory at Caltech. A senior member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the LIGO-India Scientific Collaboration, he serves on the LIGO Council and has contributed to compact binary coalescence searches as well as the development of the LAL and LALApps software libraries. His current research emphasises fast parameter estimation, low-latency inference, multi-band observations, and probing fundamental physics with gravitational waves, including signatures of dark matter and deviations from general relativity. He is also actively involved in teaching and curriculum design with an emphasis on intuition, collaboration, and computation.
Prof. Bhooshan Gadre
Prof. Bhooshan Gadre's research centres on gravitational wave astronomy and astrophysics, with particular emphasis on understanding black hole binary formation and evolution, and advancing multi-messenger astronomy through efficient low-latency detection methods. Prior to joining IUCAA, he held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (AEI) and Utrecht University, contributing to compact binary detection pipelines and developing surrogate waveform models for precessing compact binary mergers. At IUCAA, his work focuses on developing real-time detection pipelines for LIGO-India, and on targeted searches for supermassive black hole mergers, intermediate-mass black hole binaries, and sub-solar mass objects.
Prof. Sanjit Mitra
Sanjit Mitra is a professor at IUCAA, Pune. His research focuses on gravitational wave observations and the cosmic microwave background radiation. He has developed algorithms for accurate and efficient data analysis for both GW experiments and CMB missions, and has been a long-standing member of the LIGO-Virgo Scientific Collaboration, the IndIGO consortium, and the Planck Collaboration. In gravitational waves, he mainly works on the stochastic gravitational wave background and multi-messenger data analysis methods.
Dr. Shivaraj Kandhasamy
Shivaraj Kandhasamy is a Scientific Officer at IUCAA, Pune, and a member of the LIGO-India team. His expertise spans gravitational wave detector characterisation, calibration of Advanced LIGO instruments, and stochastic gravitational wave background searches. He previously held a position at the LIGO Livingston Observatory, working on detector commissioning and data analysis, and contributed to the first co-located stochastic background analysis using LIGO Hanford detectors. He has also contributed to defining the LIGO-India observatory coordinate system for GW analyses and has been active in science outreach.
Dr. Suresh Doravari
Suresh Doravari is a Senior Scientific Officer at IUCAA, Pune, working on the LIGO-India project. His expertise spans gravitational wave detector commissioning, optics, laser interferometry, and fundamental tests of physics. He has contributed to Advanced LIGO commissioning at both Livingston and Hanford observatories, worked on laser noise mitigation using auxiliary sensors in GEO600, and co-authored searches for scalar field dark matter using interferometric detectors operating beyond the quantum shot-noise limit.
Dr. Apratim Ganguly
Apratim Ganguly is a physicist at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune. He works on analysing real gravitational-wave detector data to test general relativity and extract astrophysical insights from compact object mergers. His research covers the full pipeline of gravitational wave science, including the development of analysis techniques, black hole physics, alternative theories of gravity, and connections to fast radio bursts. He received his PhD from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, and has held postdoctoral positions at ICTS-TIFR, PUCV (Chile), and Rhodes University, bringing a unique perspective to both theoretical and observational aspects of gravitational wave astronomy.
Dr. Shubhagata Bhaumik
Shubhagata Bhaumik is a postdoctoral fellow at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. She completed her PhD in 2025 at the University of Florida under the supervision of Prof. Imre Bartos. Her research focuses on gravitational-wave data analysis to uncover the origins of binary black hole systems. She specialises in eccentric binary black hole mergers, developing unmodelled search algorithms and addressing the unique challenges involved in interpreting signals from eccentric binaries. She is also committed to fostering an inclusive and accessible gravitational-wave community through mentorship and outreach.
Dr. Samanwaya Mukherjee
Samanwaya Mukherjee is an astrophysicist working as a postdoctoral researcher at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS) in Bangalore. He completed his PhD in 2024 at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune. His research focuses on gravitational waves, the tiny ripples in spacetime produced by the collision of compact objects such as black holes and neutron stars. He is particularly interested in the dynamics of black holes under extreme conditions, the behaviour of compact objects in intense gravity, including tidal heating just before merger, and the development of accurate analytical and numerical models of gravitational waveforms to compare Einstein's predictions with observations.
Dr. Sayantani Dutta
Sayantani Dutta is a postdoctoral fellow at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA). She completed her PhD at the Chennai Mathematical Institute in 2023, after which she served as a Rising Scholar postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at the University of Virginia before joining IUCAA in 2025. Her research develops new and efficient methods to test Einstein's theory of general relativity using gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences detected by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration. She is particularly interested in waveform modelling in modified theories of gravity and in creating faster, more efficient data analysis techniques.
✉ sayantani.datta@iucaa.in/a>Akash Maurya
Akash Maurya is a PhD research scholar in the Astrophysics and Relativity group at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), Bengaluru. As a gravitational-wave astrophysicist, he specialises in eccentric black hole binaries. His research focuses on source modelling of binary black holes in eccentric orbits, including surrogate modelling and phenomenology, as well as eccentric gravitational wave data analysis.
Gopal Prabhu
Gopal Prabhu is a fourth-year PhD researcher at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), working under the supervision of Prof. Shasvath J. Kapadia. His research in gravitational-wave data analysis spans population-level constraints on compact objects using the non-detection of continuous gravitational waves, a range of theoretical and data-analysis investigations in gravitational-wave lensing, and studies of compact binary coalescences occurring within dynamical astrophysical environments.
Abhishek Sharma
Abhishek Sharma is a postdoctoral research scholar at IUCAA, Pune. His work focuses on gravitational wave astronomy and data analysis. His recent work includes developing a meshfree approach for accelerated parameter estimation of supermassive black hole binaries for LISA, enabling rapid source reconstruction from multi-detector compact binary signals.
Anirban Kopty
Anirban Kopty is a fourth-year PhD research scholar at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), working under the supervision of Prof. Sanjit Mitra. His research in gravitational wave data analysis includes the development of a low-latency method for searching strongly lensed gravitational wave signals that have not yet been observed. He also contributes to fast parameter estimation techniques and tests of general relativity.
Yogita Kumari
Yogita Kumari is a second-year PhD student working under the supervision of Prof. Sanjit Mitra at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune. Her research focuses on probing cosmology using gravitational waves. She is currently working on neutron star-black hole mergers as standard sirens to measure the Hubble constant, as well as on improving All-Sky-All-Frequency searches for continuous gravitational wave sources. She is particularly interested in the statistical aspects of these problems.