I met with Aritra Ghosh at one of the historic astronomy buildings on Hillhouse Avenue and we chatted about his experiences at Yale. Aritra is a Ph.D. candidate in astronomy. He uses the latest advances in machine learning combined with traditional techniques to study the formation and evolution of galaxies, and investigate the specific role played by Active Galactic Nuclei in this process.
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Aritra was born and lived the first 21 years of his life in Kolkata in eastern India. Fascinated by how physics seemed to have an answer for most phenomena happening around us, he decided to pursue a bachelor degree in Physics at Presidency University. During undergrad, he pursued diverse research themes over three summers all with different advanced computational techniques, and finally decided to help unlock the mysteries of the universe. He went to Holland for his masters and joined Yale for his Ph.D. in Astrophysics.
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The focus of Aritra’s research is on designing machine learning algorithms to tell the shapes, sizes and brightness of the galaxies based on the image data, figuring out the correlation between the existing properties and eventually revealing how the galaxies form and evolve. When asked about the exciting images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, he was impressed by how sharper and clearer they are, and how deep the telescope could see by studying the infrared side of the wavelength. He is looking forward to the next NASA telescope which can look at large volumes of the sky, and thus he can possibly use his machine learning algorithms to extract information from the data.
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Outside of research, Aritra has been involved in student governments. He served on the Graduate Student Assembly focusing on mental health and international issues. He also works on the Astronomy Student Consultant improving the process of the admission and overall experiences of the Ph.D. student in the program. Aritra is also a Community Fellow at 254 Prospect Street. Through the events he organized, he was able to interact with a lot of people with various backgrounds. These non-academic experiences help Aritra thrive and focus better academically.
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