Professor Deepto Chakrabarty completed his S.B. (Applied Science Bachelor's) in Physics at MIT in 1988. He earned his M.S. in Physics from Caltech in 1992 and his Ph.D. in Physics from Caltech in 1996. After receiving his doctorate, he returned to MIT for three years because he was appointed as a NASA Compton GRO Fellow. During these three years, he also spent time as a visiting fellow at Balliol College, Oxford University. In 1999 he was hired as an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at MIT.
In August 2022, Professor Chakrabarty was named the new Head of the Physics Department at MIT. This is an upgrade from his position as a principal investigator at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. He is also a leader in current observational astrophysics techniques, which has allowed him to ensure that generations of astrophysicists have thorough and informative training.
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Professor Deepto Chakrabarty, Professor of Physics and
Head of Physics Department at MIT |
Chakrabarty's primary research interests include high-energy astrophysics and the physics and astrophysics of neutron stars. Besides this, he is interested in x-ray and gamma-ray astronomy as well as black holes. Specifically, Chakrabarty is a leader in the field through his understanding of millisecond pulsars, a type of fast-spinning neutron star that is formed in a binary system with an ordinary star. He has used the high speeds that these neutron stars spin at to think of new ways to observe specific characteristics of these objects in deep space. Chakrabarty and other physicists like himself have shown that oscillations in the x-ray light that these neutron stars emit can be used to measure a pulsar's spin evolution and other key parameters. His current research uses an X-ray astronomy instrument aboard the International Space Station known as NASA’s Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER). With this equipment, he and other researchers have been able to trace the source of a bright blue cosmic explosion to the birth of a neutron star or black hole. This advancement in his research is both exciting and revolutionary to the astrophysics community.
Not only is Chakrabarty the author of over 100 research papers, but he also has some very significant accomplishments under his belt. In 2006, his observations of the x-ray light emitted from millisecond pulsars earned him the Bruno Rossi Prize — the top award given by the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society (AAS). Also, he is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a legacy fellow of the American Astronomical Society. Beyond this, Chakrabarty's other awards include the MIT Buechner Teaching Prize in Physics, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and the inaugural 2017 MITx Prize for Teaching and Learning in MOOCs for his work on the 8.01x Mechanics Series. All of his awards are very well deserved, as he has not only given us new ways to observe the cosmos but also new ways to use these observations to make assumptions about the way our universe behaves.
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