Priya Natarajan was born in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu in India to academic parents.[6] She grew up in New Delhi, where she would visit Nehru Planetarium Delhi and had a great interest in celestial and terrestrial maps as a kid.[5] Her parents bought her a telescope and microscope at age four,[7] to which she commented: "it was very clear to me that it was the telescope."[8] During her high school education, her father gifted her a computer, Commodore 64 (personal computers were not known in India at the time[9]), for mapping the night sky,[10] which inspired her later education, career and writing a book Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Revealthe Cosmos, published in 2016.[11][12]
In 1984, Natarajan enrolled herself in an amateur astronomy club based at the Nehru Planetarium in New Delhi. He told the then-director of the planetarium Nirupama Raghava that she owned a personal computer and asked for a research project. Raghava immediately assigned her to plot the whole nigh sky over New Delhi. Within six weeks Natarajan self-taught sperical geometry and developed the technique to map the night sky.[9] Two years later, at age 17, she completed the project to which Raghava commented that she had become a "real scientist."[10] She completed her entire schooling at Delhi Public School.[12]
Education
Natarajan has undergraduate degrees in physics and mathematics from M.I.T (1986-1991).[13] She was awarded a Master of Science from the Program in Science, Technology & Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA (1991-1994).[13] She continued for a Ph.D. programme and started researching on the history and philosophy of life focussing on cosmology. After three years she met German astronomer Martin Schwarzschild who understood her capacity in astronomy and persuaded her to change her study to theoretical astrophysics. She later recalled: "I never really went back to finish that first PhD!"[14]
Natarajan joined the faculty of Yale University in 2000 and later promoted to professor of astronomy and physics.[6] She had served as Chair of the National Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee that advises NASA, NSF and DoE; as Chair of the Division of Astrophysics of the American Physical Society.[17] As of 2024, she was a Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton Professor and Chair of Astronomy.[6] As of 2025, she is director of the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities.[18]
Research areas
Natarajan has done extensive work in the following fields:
Gravitational lensing – reconstructing clusters with lensing; combining strong and weak lensing analysis techniques; weak lensing versus intrinsic alignments; high-resolution dark matter mapping methods; the role of structure along the line of sight in lensing; using lensing to probe the dynamics of galaxy-clusters.[13]
Cluster mass modeling: cluster surveys and lensing mass reconstructions; the Hubble Frontier Fields; comparison of lens modeling methodologies; magnification on maps and uses of clusters as natures telescopes; using caustic areas to determine cluster virial masses; virialization and cluster mass assembly; mass pro les for cluster-lenses.[13]
Substructure as a probe of dark matter: studies of the assembly of clusters in cosmological simulations; use of clusters as astrophysical laboratories to study dynamical processes like ram pressure stripping and tidal stripping; comparing lensing observations to cosmological simulations; new metrics to probe small-structure in the cluster-lenses.[13]
Cosmography with lensing: constraining dark matter and dark energy with cluster strong lensing; lensing systematics for use of clusters as cosmological probes; using lensing arc-statistics to probe non-gaussianity; consequences of the derived scaling relations for cluster lenses on the determination of cosmological parameters.[13]
Black hole physics: the physics of accretion; super-Eddington growth; the rst black holes and rst galaxies; formation of massive seed black holes at high-redshift; properties of direct collapse black hole seeds; new channel for the formation of inter-mediate mass black holes; discriminating seed formation mechanisms.[13]
Issues in galaxy formation: coupling disks and jets in AGN; role of quasars and their large-scale outflows; kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect from quasars; formation of dwarf galaxies from quasar outflows; detailed relationship between star formation and AGN activity; mass-to-light ratios of galaxies as a function of cosmic environment.[13]
Co-evolution of galaxies and their black holes: the connection between black holes and their host galaxies in the larger context of structure formation in the universe; feedback and limits to black hole growth in the early and late universe; demographic studies of the growth and evolution of black hole populations tracing correlations; the origin of co-evolution and signatures in early black holes.[13]
Multi-Messenger Astrophysics: the merger and evolution of supermassive black hole binaries in gas-rich galaxy cores; the electro-magnetic and gravitational wave signatures from these systems; gas-driven mergers of binary black holes; the evolution of eccentricity in binary black hole mergers; constraints on black hole seeds from multi-wavelength and gravitational wave data.[13]
Machine Learning & Data-driven discovery: Development of new research tools that consolidate and co-locate observational and simulated data of galaxies, quasars and simulated halos to explore the black hole- host galaxy- parent dark matter halo connection; pilot project on high-redshift quasars with creation of novel database QuasarNet to facilitate use of machine learning algorithms for making predictions for upcoming space missions and ground-based observatories, on-going work in collaboration with Google-X and the Google Computing Platform.[13]
Gamma-ray bursts – the relation of gamma-ray burst rates to the globally averaged star formation rate, the morphology and properties of gamma-ray burst host galaxies in the optical, and sub-mm wave-bands, the SN-GRB connection.[19]
Honors and awards
Natarajan was awarded the Emeline Conland Bigelow Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University in 2008.[13] In 2009, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.[13] Natarajan was also the 2009 recipient of the award for academic achievement from the Global Organization for the People of Indian Origin (GOPIO).[13] In 2010, she was the recipient of the India Abroad Foundation's "Face of the Future" Award.[13] Natarajan was elected a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2008, the Explorers Club in 2010, and the American Physical Society in 2011.[13] She was awarded a JILA (Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics) Fellowship in 2010 at University of Boulder.[13] In 2011 she was awarded an India Empire NRI award for Achievement in the Sciences in New Delhi, India.[13] She was the Caroline Herschel Distinguished Visitor at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore for 2011–2012.[13] In addition to her current appointments at Yale and Harvard, she also holds the Sophie and Tycho Brahe Professorship, Dark Cosmology Center, Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark and was recently elected to an honorary professorship for life at the University of Delhi.[20]
In 2022, Natarajan received the "‘Genius Award" from Liberty Science Center.[17] She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.[21] She was named a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society in 2024, for "seminal contributions to our understanding of the nature of dark matter and black hole physics, and for the development of a brand-new framework that enables mapping the detailed distribution of dark matter on small scales within galaxy clusters using gravitational lensing".[22]
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