Sugata Kaviraj obtained his PhD at the University of Oxford in 2006. Subsequently, he spent two years at Oxford, funded by a Leverhulme Early-Career Fellowship and a Junior Research Fellowship at Worcester College. Following this, he spent a year at UCL on a Research Fellowship from the 1851 Royal Commssion and three years at Imperial College London (ICL), funded by an ICL Research Fellowship. In 2011, Kaviraj was awarded the Royal Astronomical Society's Winton Capital Award (given to the astronomer within 5 years of their PhD whose career had shown the most promise). He joined Hertfordshire in 2013 and is currently a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College Oxford.

Kaviraj’s research spans observation and theory, bringing together multi-wavelength data with state-of-the-art galaxy formation models and machine-learning techniques. He has held leadership roles in the GALEX and MUSYC collaborations and in the recent Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) Early-Release Science programme.

Kaviraj is co-Chair of the LSST Galaxies Science Collaboration. Other ongoing project memberships include the Herschel-ATLAS, CANDELS, mJy Imaging VLBA Exploration (mJIVE-20) surveys, the Horizon-AGN simulation project and the Galaxy Zoo citizen-science consortium.

• Galaxy formation and evolution
• Galaxy formation models
• Extra-galactic globular clusters
• Black hole – galaxy co-evolution
• Impact of supernova and AGN feedback on the inter-stellar medium
• Citizen science

Dr Kaviraj’s teaching experience (including his time at Oxford and Imperial College London) have included first-year undergraduate mathematics and physics, third and fourth year astrophysics (cosmology, stellar evolution, high-energy astrophysics) and post-graduate lectures in astrophysics.

Galaxy Zoo (www.galaxyzoo.org)

GalaxyZoo is the largest citizen-science astronomy project to date, which is using 600,000+ members of the general public to collect detailed visually classified morphologies of over 1.3 million galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the existing Hubble Space Telescope archives. I lead several science themes in this project (e.g. mergers, dusty galaxies, high-redshift spheroids).

Creative Futures Initiative, Imperial College London (2009 - 2012)

Talks and workshops with pupils from inner city secondary schools in London to further public understanding of science and encourage pupils from under-represented backgrounds to consider science as a career.