Priya Natarajan, Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Yale, Proves that Stereotypes are Meant to be Broken

Throw out the term �astrophysicist� and most people picture a frizzy-haired, eccentric old man, muttering about black holes and dark matter while holed up with a telescope and a blackboard full of unintelligible equations�a mad-scientist caricature of Einstein. Priya Natarajan, tenured Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Yale, has none of those characteristics, being neither old, nor eccentric, nor solitary, nor male, though she does spend a lot of time talking and thinking about black holes. As a child, Natarajan grew up fascinated with the stars and space. An amateur astronomer and frequent visitor to the Nehru Planetarium in New Delhi, she attended one of India�s top secondary schools for math and science education. However, with broad interests in literature and philosophy as well as astronomy, Natarajan left India to pursue her college studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) because American universities offered a broader undergraduate curriculum than those in India. She graduated from MIT with a degree in physics and mathematics and a minor in philosophy.

Natarajan�s desire to combine her interests in philosophy and science led her to embark on a doctorate program in philosophy of science at MIT. Before writing her dissertation, she was offered an opportunity to study in England with Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and one of the world�s preeminent cosmologists. She left the program in philosophy of science to pursue her PhD in theoretical astrophysics at the Institute of Astronomy and Trinity College at Cambridge University. The trip across the pond was the first step in what Natarajan modestly calls an �exciting and successful intellectual adventure.� During her doctoral studies, she published a highly influential paper on mapping dark matter, where she devised a technique to map the spatial distribution of dark matter, giving scientists valuable insight and potential clues to the very nature of dark matter itself. As a result, her work was profiled in the BBC series Stephen Hawking’s Universe. She then wrote her dissertation on the growth history of black holes in the universe over cosmic time. Current research suggests that every galaxy has a black hole at its center and the formation of galaxies is closely related to the formation of black holes. Natarajan�s research explores these links. While at Cambridge, she was elected to Trinity College�s prestigious Title A Research Fellowship. A few months into the fellowship, she received an offer from Yale for an Assistant Professorship in Astronomy, a position she postponed for several years while completing her fellowship.

Natarajan continued to rack up academic accolades after arriving in New Haven. She was a Whitney Humanities Fellow for the 2006-2007 academic year and 2008-2009 Emeline Bigelow Conland Fellow and Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Her groundbreaking work on the mass limits of ultra-massive black holes was first published in an astrophysics journal in 2008 and was widely discussed in scientific community and the popular press. The research on a new channel to form the earliest black holes in the Universe led to Natarajan being awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship last year. In May 2009, Natarajan was awarded tenure and promoted to full professor at Yale. Earlier this year she was conferred with the `Face of the Future’ award by the India Abroad Foundation. She is an Associate of the Dark Cosmology Centre, Niels Bohr Institute, at the University of Copenhagen and was elected to the Sophie and Tycho Brahe Professorship there in 2009.

Natarajan knows she does not fit the typical profile of a cosmologist or astrophysicist, admitting, �A lot of the time, I was the first woman or the first Indian woman to do something.� Unlike in the United States, where math and science nerds are often pariahs in school, Natarajan says that there was �less societal pressure� in India, with its �culture of geeks…[where] the cool people were the people who did the hard stuff.� Still, schooling in India was not without its hurdles. �While there wasn�t an explicit bias,� she says, �there was enormous gender imbalance.� In her class in high school that was selected for students with exceptional math and science abilities, it had only seven female students out of a roster of forty-one. Natarajan�s field of theoretical cosmology is also extremely male-dominated, with only a handful of top female scientists. �I had to become comfortable being one of few women and not be bothered about it�it has not always been easy �� but the intellectual excitement of being part of this community is extremely satisfying and rewarding,� she says.

Natarajan is circumspect in reflecting on her career advancement: �It has been challenging being a woman, and a South Asian woman at that, in my discipline. I have been very fortunate that I have been supported and the work has been supported�It would be so much nicer if there was much more appreciation of diversity on our campuses. By diversity I do mean the full range of diversity, intellectual diversity as well as cultural and ethnic diversity. In my experience diversity benefits everybody as it poses challenges that we all need to tackle and learn from. The world is a diverse place and the more open we make our students during their education, the better prepared they will be to face the future.� A point of pride for Natarajan is her recent tenure grant and promotion to full professorship, the first tenured cosmologist, she points out, �of any kind at Yale�male or female, brown, black, yellow, or white.� She is thrilled by the development and its implications: �It�s a relatively new field for Yale, but a very exciting field. We�re really at the forefront. I have a very vibrant group of graduate students and many new excellent junior faculty who have been recruited in the past 3 - 4 years. We�re doing fantastic work, really building up critical mass in cosmology at Yale.� Natarajan and her students� research involves using high performance computing to study theoretical models combined with observational data and high-resolution images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

In addition to her research and graduate courses, Natarajan teaches an introductory-level astronomy course, ASTR 170 Introduction to Cosmology. Designed for non-science majors, the course fulfills the dreaded quantitative reasoning (QR) requirement for undergraduates. Natarajan says she particularly enjoys teaching the course and the challenges of teaching �very abstract material with the simplest of mathematical tools.� Natarajan�s interests extend beyond the classroom and the lab. She works for public dissemination of science, doing outreach work and science writing for the public. She is interested in adult numerical literacy and is designing a program to teach New Haven adults basic mathematical concepts required for financial literacy. �The recent economic crisis has shown that a lot of people are not able to make basic sound financial judgments.� She hopes to remedy this problem with her numerical literacy program, which will launch a pilot this fall.

In addition to her interests in philosophy, Natarajan loves music and writing and is a published poet. She still wants to one day write her other dissertation and finish her doctorate in the philosophy of science. She hoped to get back to work on the dissertation during her fellowship at Radcliffe this past year but confesses that her scientific research has gotten in the way: �The science has been so exciting that I haven�t been able to wean myself off of it.� On leave from teaching and administrative duties (she was the Director of Graduate Studies for the Astronomy department for the past couple of years) for the year with the Guggenheim Fellowship, she hopes to spend her time focusing on research, specifically on simulations of the formation of the first black holes.

With such varied interests and projects, Natarajan proves that stereotypes are meant to be broken.