Shri Kulkarni

Shri Kulkarni is the George Ellery Hale Professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, where he has been a faculty member since 1987. He has served as Department Chair and Director of Caltech Optical Observatories (Palomar and Keck Observatories). Currently, he leads the Zwicky Transient Survey, a large-scale effort to monitor the sky for short-timescale phenomena.

His research focuses on

• Compact objects, including neutron stars and gamma-ray bursts
• Cosmic explosions and related discoveries
• Key contributions: first detection of millisecond pulsars, brown dwarfs, galactic fast radio bursts, and determination of gamma-ray burst distances

Scientific accolades include

• Helen B. Warner Award (American Astronomical Society)
• Alan T Waterman Prize (National Science Foundation), awarded to the most accomplished scientist/engineer under 35 in the USA