Priyamvada Natarajan

Priya Natarajan was born in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu in India to academic parents. She grew up in New Delhi, where she would visit Nehru Planetarium Delhi and had a great interest in celestial and terrestrial maps as a kid. to which she commented: "it was very clear to me that it was the telescope." During her high school education, her father gifted her a computer, Commodore 64 (personal computers were not known in India at the time), for mapping the night sky, which inspired her later education, career and writing a book Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos, published in 2016. In 1984, Natarajan enrolled herself in an amateur astronomy club based at the Nehru Planetarium in New Delhi. She told the then-director of the planetarium Nirupama Raghavan that she owned a personal computer and asked for a research project. Raghavan immediately assigned her to plot the whole night sky over New Delhi. Within six weeks Natarajan self-taught spherical geometry and developed the technique to map the night sky. Two years later, she completed the project, to which Raghavan commented that she had become a "real scientist." She studied at St. Thomas's School before completing her schooling at Delhi Public School. ==Education==

Natarajan has undergraduate degrees in physics and mathematics from M.I.T (1986-1991). With the Isaac Newton Fellowship from the University of Cambridge, Natarajan moved to England for a fresh doctoral course to work with Martin Rees at the Institute of Astronomy, on supermassive black holes. She received a Ph.D. degree in 1998. She was the first woman astrophysicist elected as a Fellow at Trinity College. Prior to going to Yale, she was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto, Canada. == Career ==

Natarajan joined the faculty of Yale University in 2000 and later promoted to professor of astronomy and physics. As of 2024, she was a Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton Professor and Chair of Astronomy. Natarajan held a Whitney Humanities Fellowship at Yale (2006–2007) and was the Emeline Conland Bigelow Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (2008–2009). She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. ==Research==

Natarajan's research spans two main areas: mapping dark matter using gravitational lensing, and the formation and growth of supermassive black holes across cosmic time. Dark matter mapping Natarajan developed a method for mapping the distribution of dark matter on small scales within galaxy clusters using gravitational lensing. Her technique combines strong and weak lensing to reconstruct the substructure of cluster-lenses at high resolution, and has become a standard tool in observational cosmology. This model addresses the problem of how supermassive black holes observed at very high redshift could have grown so massive so quickly. In 2023, Natarajan and collaborators reported the detection of UHZ1, an X-ray-luminous source at redshift z ≈ 10.1 identified using the James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory, consistent with an actively accreting black hole with properties matching the direct-collapse seed model. Self-regulation of black hole growth Natarajan proposed that AGN feedback imposes an upper mass limit — a "ceiling" — on black hole growth, predicting that the most massive black holes self-regulate through the energy they inject into their surroundings. This prediction, made around 2008, was subsequently confirmed by observational surveys of black hole demographics. ==Honors and awards==

• Fellow, Royal Astronomical Society, 2008 • Emeline Conland Bigelow Fellowship, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard, 2008–2009 • Honorary Professor for Life, University of Delhi • "Genius Award", Liberty Science Center, 2022 • Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2023 • Fellow, American Astronomical Society, 2024 • Time 100 Most Influential People, 2024 • Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics, 2025 ==References==