Indian Astronomers Around the World

Dr. Varun Bhalerao is an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He obtained a B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering at IIT Bombay, followed by a Ph.D. from Caltech in 2012. During his thesis, he worked on NuSTAR - the first focussing hard X-ray telescope - a Caltech / JPL / NASA mission. He also studied High Mass X-ray Binaries with optical and infrared telescopes to measure neutron star masses. As a Vaidya-Raichaudhury Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at IUCAA, Pune, he led the ground calibration of the Cadmium Zinc Telluride Imager on AstroSat - the Indian multi-wavelength space telescope. At IIT Bombay, his group works on the development of GROWTH-India - India's first fully robotic telescope. The group leads the Indian effort in the study of elusive electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave sources. He is the principal investigator for the proposed Daksha mission - the worlds most sensitive telescope for high energy transients.

Varun Bhalerao is a recipient of the Vainu Bappu gold medal of the Astronomical Society of India. He is an associate fellow of the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), a former associate of the Indian Academy of Sciences, and recipient of the DST INSPIRE faculty fellowship. He has been awarded the IIT Bombay Early Research Achiever Award (2019), the Krithi Ramamritham Award for creative engineering (2019), the IIT Bombay departmental award for Excellence in Teaching (2023), and the Dhananjay Joshi Fundamental Research Award (2025). He has published more than 100 refereed papers.