Priya Natarajan

Priyamvada Natarajan is an astrophysicist, and the inaugural Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton Professor in Astronomy & Physics at Yale. She has made seminal contributions to our understanding of the nature of dark matter using gravitational lensing studies; and the assembly history of supermassive black holes over cosmic time. The recipient of many awards and honors, including fellowships of the APS; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the AAAS; the Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships, she was recognized with the 2022 Liberty Science Center “Genius Award.” Priya has served as Chair of the National Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee that advises NASA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Department of Energy (DOE); as Chair of the Division of Astrophysics of the American Physical Society (APS) and is currently on the Scientific Editorial Board of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) Journals. With undergraduate degrees from M.I.T., she received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge, where she was elected a Fellow of Trinity College. She is the current Chair of the Department of Astronomy and an external Principal Investigator at Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative.

More info: https://physics.yale.edu/people/priyamvada-natarajan