Ajit Kembhavi

Ajit Kembhavi works at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune. He was the director and distinguished professor there until August 2015 and later a Raja Ramanna fellow. He is currently a Visiting Distinguished Professor at IIT-Bombay. He did his Ph.D. from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) Mumbai, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge. Professor Kembhavi is a distinguished astronomer who works on galaxies, quasars and other extragalactic objects, various areas of high energy astrophysics including X-ray and radio pulsars, and applications of AI techniques to astronomy. He has published many research papers and several books. Professor Kembhavi has been a member of the Space Commission and is presently a member of the ISRO’s Apex Science Board. He was a vice-president of the International Astronomical Union, president of the Astronomical Society of India, and president of the Indian Association of General relativity and Gravitation.

Prof. Pushpa Khafre is M.Sc. (Physics) gold medalist from Indore University. She did her Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) Mumbai and her postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy at Munich, Germany and at the University of Manchester, UK. She then joined as a professor of Physics at the Utkal University, Bhubaneswar, Orissa, in 1983. After retiring from there in 2010, she was CSIR Emeritus Fellow at the Inter-university Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune for four years. She had been an associate of IUCAA, since its inception in 1990 till her retirement. She has mainly worked on the Interstellar medium, Quasar absorption lines and Gravitational lensing, and has published more than 50 research papers in international peer reviewed journals. Professor Khare has visited several institutes around the world for teaching and research. She has been very active in astronomy popularisation and public outreach.