Prof. Ramesh Narayan
Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University, USA
Prof. Narayan is internationally recognized for his contributions to a variety of areas in astrophysics, including accretion disks, active galactic nuclei, black holes, gamma-ray bursts, gravitational lensing,image processing, interstellar scattering, pulsars, and X-ray binaries. In the area of black holes, he has obtained strong evidence for the existence of the "event horizon", the one-way membrane which "vacuums up" energy from its surroundings. He has also developed methods to measure the spin parameters of black holes using observations from major ground- and space-based telescopes, including the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Prof. Narayan has been a professor at Harvard University for 20 years, serving as chair of Harvard's Astronomy Department from 1997 to 2001. He has been awarded a Presidential Young Investigator award from the NSF, and has delivered a number of named lectures, including the Darwin Lecture at the Royal Astronomical Society of London (2002). Prof. Narayan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London (2006) and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2009).