Priyamvada Natarajan

Priyamvada Natarajan is a professor in the departments of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University who has significantly contributed to mapping dark matter and dark energy. She is especially known for her work in gravitational lensing and in the development of models that describe the assembly and accretion histories of supermassive black holes. Natarajan authored the book "Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos" and has done extensive work in the fields of gravitational lensing, clusters of galaxies, accretion physics, issues in galaxy formation, and the fueling of quasars, and binary black holes.

Over the course of her career, Natarajan has received several prestigious fellowships. She was awarded the Emeline Conland Bigelow Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University in 2008, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009, a JILA Fellowship in 2010, and the India Empire NRI Award for Achievement in the Sciences in 2011. She has been elected as a fellow of multiple esteemed societies, including the Royal Astronomical Society in 2009, the American Physical Society in 2010, the Explorers Club in 2010, and the American Astronomical Society in 2024. Additionally, she was named a new member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023. Further recognition for her work came when she was named one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2024 by Time magazine.

In addition to her current appointments at Yale and Harvard, Natarajan also holds the Sophie and Tycho Brahe Professorship at the Dark Cosmology Center, Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and was elected to an honorary professorship for life at the University of Delhi. She was the Caroline Herschel Distinguished Visitor at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore from 2011-2012. Among her other contributions to the scientific community, Natarajan also served on the scientific advisory board of Nova ScienceNow and delivered the 10th Annual Wali Lecture on October 26, 2017.

Natarajan holds undergraduate degrees in Physics and Mathematics from M.I.T., and conducted her graduate work in theoretical astrophysics at the Institute of Astronomy, the University of Cambridge in England, earning a Ph.D. degree in 1998. Prior to joining Yale, she was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto, Canada.