I study supernovae and the fast outflows they drive, and build numerical methods that can follow them as they grow.
Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow, Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Background: one of my simulations of supernova ejecta running into surrounding gas, with the shocked gas lit up.
I am a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Before that I was a VITA Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia, from September 2024 to August 2026. I received my PhD from Purdue University, advised by Prof. Paul Duffell.
I study high-velocity astrophysical outflows and develop numerical techniques for modelling them. I wrote Sprout, a hydro code whose computational domain expands with the fluid, which makes it cheap to follow outflows that grow over many orders of magnitude in space and time. My main interests are supernovae, the explosive deaths of stars, and the remnants they leave behind, along with the stellar evolution and radiative processes that shape what we observe. I have also worked on astrophysical jets, from both the theory and the observing side.
Away from work I cook, stargaze, play badminton and soccer, and spend time on my gaming console. I grew up in Kolkata, the City of Joy, in West Bengal, India.
Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow
Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Taiwan
VITA Postdoctoral Research Fellow
University of Virginia
Visiting Researcher
Purdue University
PhD, Physics and Astronomy
Purdue University
MS, Physics and Astronomy
Purdue University
BE, Electrical Engineering
Jadavpur University
Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship
ASIAA, Taiwan
IAU Travel Grant
IAU Symposium 406
KVPY Fellowship
Government of India
Co-I, NASA JWST program
Tracing ejecta and dust evolution in the Type Ia remnant SNR 0509-67.5; 40.5 hours of observing time
Summer Lecturer, PHYS 221 (Electrodynamics)
Purdue University
Teaching Assistant, PHYS 536 (Modern Electronics Lab)
Purdue University
Teaching Assistant, PHYS 172 (Modern Mechanics)
Purdue University
Teaching Assistant, PHYS 263 (Introduction to Astronomy)
Purdue University
LOC member, Kavli Summer Program in Astrophysics
University of Virginia
LOC member, Rise_Time 2024
Purdue University
Vice President, Physics Graduate Students Association
Purdue University
Event lead, Circuistic, Convolution tech fest
Jadavpur University
Mass transfer in a binary leaves the circumstellar material around an exploding star strongly aspherical. Building that material in 3D with Sprout and computing light curves along different lines of sight, the same explosion can look up to five times brighter or fainter depending on where we view it from, and spherical 1D fits can misjudge its mass-loss rate by more than 200%.
How a white dwarf exploded should leave a fingerprint in the turbulent clumps of its remnant. In 3D simulations, clumps rich in iron-group elements and clumps rich in silicon and sulfur grow to different sizes depending on the explosion mechanism. Tycho's remnant and SNR 0509-67.5 both point to double detonations of sub-Chandrasekhar-mass white dwarfs.
Sprout solves ideal hydrodynamics on a Cartesian grid that expands with the flow. Following an outflow over several orders of magnitude in size keeps shocks and fine structure sharp, with little numerical diffusion and longer time steps, which makes it well suited to supernova remnants and AGN outflows.
3D models of remnants expanding into their surroundings, analysed through angular power spectra of the Rayleigh–Taylor structure at the interface. Applied to Chandra images of Tycho's remnant, the same spectrum recovers the scale of its fleece-like features and gives a circumstellar density of about 0.28 cm⁻³.
Forty relativistic hydrodynamic simulations spanning engine luminosity, opening angle and ambient density. The Fanaroff–Riley split appears naturally, and recollimation shocks produce knots whose number scales with the jet-head energy density, consistent with M87 and Cygnus A.
Also on my NASA ADS library and Google Scholar.
The Astrophysical Journal 1004, 53, 2026arXiv
A 3D Numerical Study of Anisotropies in Supernova Remnants
The Astrophysical Journal 956, 130, 2023ADS
Sprout: A Moving-Mesh Hydro Code Using a Uniformly Expanding Cartesian Grid
The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series 269, 30, 2023ADS
Numerical Investigation of Dynamical and Morphological Trends in Relativistic Jets
The Astrophysical Journal 935, 42, 2022ADS
Optimal Energy Management of Microgrids under Environmental Constraints Using Chaos Enhanced Differential Evolution
Renewable Energy Focus 34, 129–141, 2020
3D Kinematic Reconstruction of the Crab Nebula that Includes the Northern Ejecta “Jet”
The Astrophysical Journal 1007, 130, 2026
The Non-uniform Expansion of the Crab Nebula
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 544, 1–12, 2025arXiv
Sculpting the Morphology of Supernova Remnant Pa 30 via Efficient Ejecta Cooling
arXiv e-prints, 2403.13641, 2024arXiv
TXS 0128+554: A Young Gamma-Ray-Emitting Active Galactic Nucleus with Episodic Jet Activity
The Astrophysical Journal 899, 141, 2020ADS
Non-convex Emission Constrained Economic Dispatch Using a New Self-Adaptive Particle Swarm Optimization Technique
Applied Soft Computing 28, 188–195, 2015
Colloquium, Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics
TAPIR seminar, California Institute of Technology
THEA seminar, Columbia University
Stars and Plasma Astrophysics meeting, Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute
ITC luncheon seminar, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
TAPIR seminar, California Institute of Technology
Special seminar, CIERA, Northwestern University
Special seminar, New York University
Compact objects meeting, Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute
THEA seminar, Columbia University
Friday lunch seminar, Carnegie Observatories
Numerical studies of high-velocity outflows using an expanding mesh
TAC seminar, UC Berkeley
State of the Universe seminar, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai
Characterizing anisotropies in supernova remnants
Tea talk, Carnegie Observatories
Rise_Time, Purdue University, USA
IAU Symposium 406, Turku, Finland
SN100 Conference, Stockholm, Sweden
Rutgers Summer Transient Soiree, Rutgers University, USA
Annual Symposium, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, USA
Rise_Time, Purdue University, USA
Supernova Remnants III, Crete, Greece
Supernova Explosions (SNEX) Conference, Technion, Israel
Michael Faraday IET International Summit, Kolkata, India
A talk for a general audience at Astronomy on Tap Charlottesville, a night of short astronomy talks at a local bar.
I talked with Paul Duffell about my research on supernovae and how I ended up in astrophysics.
A five-day on-campus program for middle-school students. I led Scaling the Solar System, where students worked out scale factors for planet sizes and distances, then built their models and placed them across campus.
Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Taipei, Taiwan
