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Dr. Nirupam Roy is an Associate Professor and Convener of the Joint Astronomy Programme in the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. He did MSc (2005) and PhD (2009) in Physics from the National Center for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA-TIFR). Subsequently, Dr. Roy was a Jansky Fellow (2009-12) at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, USA, and then a Humboldt Fellow (2013-15) at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn. He worked as an Assistant Professor of the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur (2015-16), before joining IISc in 2016. Dr. Roy has been awarded the Young Scientist Medal by the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) in 2013 and the Laxminarayana & Nagalaxmi Modali award of the Astronomical Society of India (ASI) in 2024. He has also served as one of the Ambassador Scientists of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in India during 2018-24.

The primary expertise of Dr. Roy is in the field of radio astronomy, and his research interests include study of the ISM and star formation, galactic novae, and observational cosmology.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Roy is planning to study low-frequency diffuse radio emission from Milky Way, other galaxies and galaxy clusters. These will be used to explore the nature of astrophysical turbulence as well as to address some of the challenges of detecting the cosmological 21-cm signal.

Mr. Arpan Pal is a PhD candidate at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics – Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (NCRA-TIFR), Pune, Maharashtra. His doctoral research focuses on studying the interaction of merger shocks with the intra-cluster medium in galaxy clusters. He uses a technique called radio interferometry which combines data from different radio antennas to form a large and sensitive radio telescope to study these objects in detail. His research also focuses on optimizing radio interferometry techniques to get a much clearer and sharper picture of the universe.

Arpan holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Burdwan Raj College, Burdwan and a master’s degree in physics from NCRA-TIFR. He collaborates actively with many national and international research groups and played an important role of projects that use both ground and space-based telescopes ranging from radio to X-rays.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at the National Radio Astronomical Observatory, Socorro, Arpan is exploring how several biases affect radio polarimetric imaging and, in turn, the conclusions in general. This is possibly the first attempt to characterize the radio polarimetric biases in the wide-band era of radio interferometry. He is part of the Algorithms Research and Development Group at NRAO. Arpan loves fishing, cooking and exploring new fishing spots and recipes.