As provost of Hopkins, Jayawardhana has advanced the institution's research enterprise, academic programs, and student success. He has spearheaded numerous major initiatives, including the establishment of the Data Science and AI Institute, launch of the School of Government and Policy, expansion of the Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships program, the Hopkins AI Portal, the Provost's Fellows for Public Engagement program, and the Arts Initiative.[3]
Jayawardhana is the co-author of more than 175 scientific papers, with over 10,000 citations.[6]
While a graduate student at Harvard, Jayawardhana led one of the two teams that discovered a dusty disk around HR 4796, a young star, with a large inner hole, which was possibly carved out during the planet formation processes.[7] While he was a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, he and his collaborators discovered an edge-on protoplanetary disk in a young quadruple star system, using adaptive optics on the Gemini North telescope.[8][9]
While at UC Berkeley and as a faculty member at the Universities of Michigan and Toronto, Jayawardhana played a key role in establishing that young brown dwarfs undergo a T Tauri phase, similar to young Sun-like stars, with evidence for dusty disks and signatures of disk accretion and outflow. Disks have now also been found around sub-brown dwarfs or planemos. In September 2008, he and his collaborators reported the first direct image and spectroscopy of a likely extra-solar planet around a normal star.[10] While serving as a dean at Cornell and provost at Johns Hopkins, Jayawardhana has continued to be active in research, publishing numerous papers on exoplanets and brown dwarfs using the James Webb Space Telescope and large ground-based telescopes.[11]
In July 2023, Johns Hopkins University announced that Jayawardhana had been selected as its 16th provost.[14] His primary research areas include the formation and early evolution of stars, brown dwarfs and planets.[15]
Canada Research Chair in Observational Astrophysics (2008)
E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship (2009)[17] awarded to enhance the career development of outstanding and highly promising university faculty who are earning a strong international reputation for original research,[18] from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, presented by Prime Minister Stephen Harper at a ceremony in Ottawa on March 16, 2009.[19]
↑Lafrenière, David; Jayawardhana, Ray; van Kerkwijk, Marten H. (2008). "Direct Imaging and Spectroscopy of a Planetary-Mass Candidate Companion to a Young Solar Analog". The Astrophysical Journal. 689 (2): L153. arXiv:0809.1424. Bibcode:2008ApJ...689L.153L. doi:10.1086/595870. S2CID15685566.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
