Kulkarni named to NAS

Shri Kulkarni, Caltech’s MacArthur Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science, is one of 72 researchers elected this year to the National Academy of Sciences. The 1,922 active NAS members now include 67 Caltech faculty and three trustees.

Kulkarni is a leading authority on exotic astrophysical phenomena such as gamma-ray bursts and brown dwarfs, and has been associated with many major advances in understanding the universe. In 1982, along with Don Backer of UC Berkeley, he discovered the first millisecond pulsar. These pulsars have turned out to be precise natural clocks with many applications.

In 1995, Kulkarni led a group that discovered the first brown dwarf, a “failed star” with a mass too low to shine like a star but too high to be a planet. Two years later, he and his colleagues showed gamma-ray bursts to be extragalactic in origin, and he has since led many further investigations into the phenomenon.

Kulkarni has been a leader in the quest to improve the resolution of optical instruments with interferometry, a technique that combines light from two or more mirrors for a superior image. Working with JPL engineers, his research team used the testbed interferometer at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in 2000 to obtain the most precise distance to date for a Cepheid variable, a type of pulsating star that is a standard reference for gauging astronomical distances. Heavily involved with the Keck Interferometer, Kulkarni is also the interdisciplinary scientist for NASA’s Space Interferometry Mission, set to launch in 2009 and with which astronomers hope to catalog planets around nearby stars.

After receiving a master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology and a PhD from UC Berkeley, Kulkarni came to Caltech in 1985 as a research fellow, joining the professorial faculty in 1987. He is a former Presidential Young Investigator, Sloan Research Fellow, and Waterman Prize winner.
•