Dr. Rahul Kumar received his BSc (Honors) in Physics from Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi, in 2012 and his MSc from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, in 2015. He then earned his PhD in 2021 under the guidance of Prof. Sushant Ghosh and Prof. Mohammad Sami at the Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He is currently working as a postdoctoral f ellow at the University of KwaZulu Natal, Durban, South Africa.

He has a brilliant academic track record, graduating with 1st class with distinction since high school, passed several competitive exams, including JAM, JEST, GATE, BARC, and NET/JRF with a good rank, and was awarded a DST-INSPIRE scholarship in 2009, followed by an INSPIRE F ellowship for his PhD He also received a visiting fellow ship from ICTP-Italy in 2018, a journal cover page covering his work in 2018, and a Young Scientist Award in 2021. For a DST-ASEAN project awarded in 2018, he contributed as Co-PI from the Indian side. He has already published 19 research papers in acclaimed international journals with more than 850 citations, reflecting the quality of his work on black holes.

His doctoral research work dealt with hairy rotating black holes arising from modified theories of gravity, with a primary focus on testing their viability for astrophysical black hole candidates. Constraints on black hole parameters are derived from gravitational lensing and M87* black hole shadow observational data from the Event Horizon Telescope, and possible thermodynamic phase transitions in extended phase space were identified. He has proposed a novel way to estimate the black hole parameters from its shadow and empirically shown that a given shadow may not always correspond to a unique black hole.

The proposed Fulbright-Nehru project aims to address the timely issue of using shadow observational data to distinguish a black hole from a horizon-less ultra-compact object and intends to find the traces and predict the specific observational signatures of naturally arising quantum gravitational effects around the black hole.