CV Priyamvada Natarajan
Priyamvada Natarajan has made seminal contributions to two key open problems in astrophys-ics– our understanding of the nature of dark matter and black hole physics. Her foundational work using gravitational lensing has helped establish substructure – the distribution of dark mat-ter on small-scales in galaxy clusters – as a critical diagnostic of the nature of dark matter. She has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the formation, fueling and feed-back from supermassive black holes. She proposed the physics for new channels to form the first black hole seeds and developed the methodological framework linking black holes to their larger scale environments. Her work has enabled the demographic modeling of black hole populations as a function of cosmic epoch permitting direct comparison with multi-wavelength observations of black holes. She is the recipient of many awards and honors including the Rad-cliffe, Guggenheim and Caroline Herschel Fellowships, and the Face of the Future Award. She is a fellow of the APS, the Royal Astronomical Society, the Explorers Club and is a former chair of the APS Division of Astrophysics and serves as the current chair of the National Astronomy & Astrophysics Advisory Committee. She holds the Sophie & Tycho Brahe Professorship at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen; the Schrodinger Visiting Professorship at the Pauli Center for Theoretical Physics in Zurich and an honorary professorship at the Universi-ty of Delhi, India. In addition to her appointment in the Astronomy & Physics departments, she is the Director of the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities at Yale.