Priyamvada Natarajan Receives the Liberty Science Center Genius Award

Priyamvada Natarajan, a Yale astrophysicist who explores cosmology, gravitational lensing, and black hole physics, is being honored with a Liberty Science Center Genius Award for her extensive body of work mapping the unseen universe. She is being honored for her research on dark matter, dark energy, and black holes.

The Liberty Science Center is a 300,000-square-foot, not-for-profit learning center located in Liberty State Park on the Jersey City bank of the Hudson River near the Statue of Liberty.

“I am deeply grateful and humbled by this award and recognition,” said Dr. Natarajan, who is a professor of astronomy and physics and incoming chair of the department of astronomy in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “My own love affair with the cosmos started when I was a kid growing up in India visiting the Nehru Planetarium in New Delhi regularly. It is a real honor and privilege to be a scientist and engage deeply with our wondrous and mysterious universe and be able to share insights, exciting results, and most of all the thrill of discovery with everyone.”

Professor Natarajan joined the Yale faculty in 2000. She is the author of the award-winning book Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas that Reveal the Cosmos (Yale University Press, 2016).

Dr. Natarajan is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned a Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics from the University of Cambridge in England.