Shrinivas Ramchandra Kulkarni (born 4 October 1956) is a US-based astronomer born and raised in India.[2] He is currently a professor of astronomy and planetary scienceatCalifornia Institute of Technology,[3] and he served as director of Caltech Optical Observatory (COO) at California Institute of Technology, in which capacity he oversaw the Palomar and Keck among other telescopes.[3] He is the recipient of a number of awards and honours.
Shrinivas Ramchandra Kulkarni was born on 4 October 1956 in the small town of KurundwadinMaharashtra, into a Hindu family. His father, Dr. R. H. Kulkarni, was a surgeon based in Hubballi and his mother, Vimala Kulkarni, was a home-maker. He is one of four children and has three sisters, Sunanda Kulkarni, Sudha Murthy (educator, author, philanthropist and wife of one of the co-founders of Infosys) and Jaishree Deshpande (wife of Gururaj Deshpande).[4][5][6]
In 1987, Kulkarni obtained a position as faculty at the California Institute of Technology.[3] According to his website, he has mentored 64 young scholars by the end of 2016.
Kulkarni is known for making key discoveries that open new sub-fields within astronomy, using wide range of wavelength in observation. ADS shows that his papers cover following fields: (1) HI absorption studies of Milky Way Galaxy, (2) pulsars, millisecond pulsars, and globular cluster pulsars, (3) brown dwarfs and other sub-stellar objects, (4) soft gamma-ray repeaters, (5) gamma-ray bursts, and (6) optical transients. He made significant contributions in these sub-fields of astronomy.
Kulkarni started off his career as a radio astronomer. He studied Milky Way Galaxy using HI absorption under the guidance of his advisor Carl Heiles, and observed its four arms.[8] The review articles he wrote with Carl Heiles have been highly cited in the field of interstellar medium.[9][10]
He discovered the first millisecond pulsar called PSR B1937+21[11] with Donald Backer and colleagues, while he was a graduate student. In 1986, he found the first optical counterpart of binary pulsars,[12] while he was a Millikan Fellow at California Institute of Technology. He was instrumental in discovery of the first globular cluster pulsar in 1987[13] using a supercomputer.
Caltech-NRAO team which he led showed in 1997 that gamma-ray bursts came from extra-galactic sources,[17] and identified optical counterparts.[18] 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.[19]
The success of his astronomical research is evident by 63 Nature Letters, 7 Science Letters, and total of 479 refereed scientific articles that bear his name by the end of 2015, according to ADS. Recognizing his contribution to astronomy, he was awarded the Dan David Prize in 2017.[24]
Kulkarni has been the Jury Chair for the Infosys Prize for the discipline of Physical Sciences since 2009.[33] The prize is awarded by the Infosys Foundation, whose founder is Kulkarni's brother-in-law, Narayana Murthy.
^Kulkarni, Shrinivas R. (1983). Studies of galactica HI in 21-centimeter absorption (PhD Thesis: UC Berkeley). Berkeley, California. Bibcode:1984PhDT.........4K.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^Kulkarni, Shrinivas R.; Heiles, Carl (1988). Verschuur, G. L.; Kellerman, K.I. (eds.). Neutral hydrogen and the diffuse interstellar medium. in Galactic and Extragalactic Radio Astronomy. New York: Springer-Verlag. pp. 95–153. Bibcode:1988gera.book...95K.
^Kulkarni, Shrinivas R.; Heiles, Carl (1987). "The Atomic Component". The atomic component. in Interstellar Processes; Proceedings of the Symposium, Grand Teton National Park, WY, July 1-7,1986. Astrophysics and Space Science Library. Vol. 134. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co. pp. 87–122. Bibcode:1987ASSL..134...87K. doi:10.1007/978-94-009-3861-8_5. ISBN978-90-277-2485-4.
^Lyne, A. G.; Brinklow, A.; Middleditch, J.; Kulkarni, S. R.; Backer, D. C.; Clifton, T. R. (1987), "The Discovery of a Millisecond Pulsar in the Globular Cluster M28)", Nature, 328 (6129): 399–401, Bibcode:1987Natur.328..399L, doi:10.1038/328399a0, S2CID4333586
^Metzgar, M. R.; Djorgovski, S. G.; Kulkarni, S. R.; et al. (1997), "Spectral constraints on the redshift of the optical counterpart to the gamma-ray burst of 8 May 1997", Nature, 387 (6636): 878–880, Bibcode:1997Natur.387..878M, doi:10.1038/43132
^Djorgovski, S. G.; Metzgar, M. R.; Kulkarni, S. R.; et al. (1997), "The optical counterpart to the gamma-ray burst GRB970508", Nature, 387 (6636): 876–878, Bibcode:1997Natur.387..876D, doi:10.1038/43126
^Nakajima, T.; Oppenheimer, B. R.; Kulkarni, S. R.; Golimowski, D. A.; Matthews, K.; Durrance, S. (1995), "Discovery of a Cool Brown Dwarf", Nature, 378 (6556): 463–465, Bibcode:1995Natur.378..463N, doi:10.1038/378463a0, S2CID4351772
