Shrinivas Kulkarni

Shrinivas Ramchandra Kulkarni (born 4 October 1956) is an Indian American astronomer. He is a professor of astronomy and planetary science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and was the director of the Caltech Optical Observatory (COO), overseeing the Palomar and Keck among other telescopes.

Kulkarni and his sisters grew up in Hubballi, Karnataka, and received their schooling at local schools there. He obtained his MS in applied physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1978 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1983.

He discovered the first millisecond pulsar called PSR B1937+21 with Donald Backer and colleagues, while he was a graduate student. In 1986, he found the first optical counterpart of binary pulsars, while he was a Millikan Fellow at California Institute of Technology. He was instrumental in discovery of the first globular cluster pulsar in 1987 using a supercomputer.

With Dale Frail at NRAO and Toshio Murakami and his colleagues at ISAS (predecessor of JAXA that was led by Yasuo Tanaka at that time), Kulkarni showed that soft gamma-ray repeaters are neutron stars associated with supernova remnants. This discovery eventually led to the understanding that neutron stars with extremely high magnetic field called magnetars are the soft gamma-ray repeaters.

Caltech-NRAO team which he led showed in 1997 that gamma-ray bursts came from extra-galactic sources, and identified optical counterparts. Their research initiated the detailed studies of the sources of gamma-ray bursts along with the European team led by Jan van Paradijs.

He was also a member of the Caltech team that observed the first irrefutable brown dwarf in 1994 that orbited around a star called Gliese 229.

His recent work involved Palomar Transient Factory which has succeeded in identifying the new groups of optical transients such as superluminous supernovae, calcium-rich supernovae, and luminous red novae.

Awards and honours Some of the awards he has received include the following:

NSF's Alan T. Waterman Award in 1992 Helen B. Warner Prize from the American Astronomical Society in 1991 Jansky Prize in 2002 Dan David Prize in 2017 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2026

In 2015, he received an honorary doctorate from Radboud University in the Netherlands. In 2024, he was awarded the Shaw Prize in Astronomy.

Services to the field Kulkarni has been the Jury Chair for the Infosys Prize for the discipline of Physical Sciences since 2009. The prize is awarded by the Infosys Foundation, whose founder is Kulkarni's brother-in-law, Narayana Murthy.

Kulkarni is a member of four national academies. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, London, in 2001, a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2003, an honorary fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences in 2012, and a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences on 12 September 2016.