Plenary Lectures and VIP Guests

Raja GuhaThakurta

Short Bio:

Raja GuhaThakurta is a Distinguished Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California Santa Cruz. He studies the formation and evolution of galaxies: assembly of their dark matter, dynamics of their resolved stellar population, merger history, chemical enrichment history, and star formation history. He has a growing interest in rare phases of stellar evolution. He makes extensive use of the Keck telescopes, Hubble Space Telescope, James Webb Space Telescope, and many other telescopes for his research. He has 900 publications (scientific journal articles, conference papers/abstracts, astronomical bulletins, etc). He is the founder and faculty director of the successful Science Internship Program (SIP), in which high school students are mentored by UCSC researchers and work on cutting-edge STEAM research projects. He also founded/co-founded three other educational initiatives: (1) Shadow the Scientists (StS), which allows students and educators to eavesdrop via Zoom on scientists while they conduct research; (2) Python and Research (PyaR), an online computer programming tutorial set in the context of astronomy research; and (3) Shadow Indigenous Worlds (SIW), which is similar in format to StS but but with a focus on Indigenous knowledge. These programs reside within the CREST department that GuhaThakurta started at UCSC. He won the 2025 Education Prize of the American Astronomical Society, and has been appointed a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China from 2023–2025, American Astronomical Society Fellow in 2021, Outstanding Faculty in UCSC's Physical and Biological Sciences Division in 2020–2021, Raymond and Beverly Sackler Distinguished Lecturer at Tel-Aviv University in 2018, and visiting faculty at Google in 2015. He was awarded the National Research Council of Canada's Herzberg Memorial Prize and Fellowship in 2001, and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 1997. He received his Ph.D. in Astrophysical Sciences from Princeton University in 1989 and his B.Sc. in Physics from St. Xavier's College in Kolkata, India in 1983. He dabbles in art in his (non-existent) spare time.