Who Is Priyamvada Natarajan, Indian Named In Time's Most Influential List

Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People list of 2024 features a range of Indians across various fields. This annual grouping acknowledges people worldwide for their global influence. The list included artists, business leaders, actors, athletes, professors, scientists and politicians who have left a significant mark through their work. 

Priyamvada Natarajan, an Indian professor at Yale University, is among those featured on the list this year.

Here are some facts about Priyamvada Natarajan

1. Priyamvada Natarajan is an astrophysicist and a Professor of Astronomy and Professor of Physics at Yale University, Connecticut. She chairs the Astronomy department and is also the Chairperson of the Women Faculty Forum. Additionally, Ms Nataranjan is the Director of Yale's flagship inter-disciplinary Franke Program in Science and the Humanities in Yale. 

2. Ms Natarajan began her education at Delhi Public School in Delhi before pursuing her undergraduate degrees in Physics and Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She also graduated in the History and Philosophy of Science at MIT's Program in Science, Technology & Society. Ms Natarajan later completed her PhD at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, during which she held the prestigious Isaac Newton studentship and was also a fellow of Trinity College. 

3. Ms Natarajan's research is based on studies of supermassive black holes, focusing on how they form, grow, and influence their surroundings over time. She uses simulations and models to understand how black holes interact with their host galaxies and the larger cosmos. Her goal is to discover the basic processes involved in black hole evolution and predict what we can observe from them using various tools.

4. In 2022, Ms Natarajan was awarded the Liberty Science Center's Genius Award. She has also been honoured with fellowships from several institutions such as the American Physical Society (APS), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute. 

5. Ms Natarajan is the author of ‘Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas that Reveal the Cosmos' which came out in 2016.