Viraj is a NASA Hubble Fellow at Columbia University and a guest researcher at the Center for Computational Astrophysics. Previously, he was a PhD student in the Astrophysics Department at Caltech.
His field of research is time-domain and multi-messenger astronomy - the study of our dynamic sky.
He is currently studying unusual cosmic explosions, stars that show unusual variations in their brightness and hunting for light from gravitational waves.
He uses robotic telescopes that survey the sky at the visual and infrared wavelengths to look for such stars and explosions. Once identified, he uses some of the largest telescopes in the world to study them in more detail. He also works on developing software to enable discoveries of such phenomena.
Mentor
Kishalay De