Shrinivas Kulkarni

Shrinivas Ramchandra Kulkarni was born on 4 October 1956 in the small town of Kurundwad in Maharashtra, into a Hindu family. His father, Dr. R. H. Kulkarni, was a surgeon based in Hubballi and his mother, Vimala Kulkarni, was a home-maker. He is one of four children and has three sisters, Sunanda Kulkarni, Sudha Murthy (educator, author, philanthropist and wife of one of the co-founders of Infosys) and Jaishree Deshpande (wife of Gururaj Deshpande).^[4][5][6]

Kulkarni and his sisters grew up in Hubballi, Karnataka, and received their schooling at local schools there.^[2][4][7][5] He obtained his MS in applied physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1978 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1983.^[3]

In 1987, Kulkarni obtained a position as faculty at the California Institute of Technology.^[3] ADS shows that his papers cover following fields: (1) HI absorption studies of Milky Way Galaxy, (2) pulsars, millisecond pulsars, and globular cluster pulsars, (3) brown dwarfs and other sub-stellar objects, (4) soft gamma-ray repeaters, (5) gamma-ray bursts, and (6) optical transients.

Kulkarni started off his career as a radio astronomer. He studied the Milky Way Galaxy using HI absorption under the guidance of his advisor Carl Heiles, and observed its four arms.^[8]

He discovered the first millisecond pulsar called PSR B1937+21^[9] with Donald Backer and colleagues, while he was a graduate student. In 1986, he found the first optical counterpart of binary pulsars,^[10] while he was a Millikan Fellow at California Institute of Technology. He was instrumental in discovery of the first globular cluster pulsar in 1987^[11] using a supercomputer.

With Dale Frail at NRAO and Toshio Murakami and his colleagues at ISAS (predecessor of JAXA that was led by Yasuo Tanaka at that time), Kulkarni showed that soft gamma-ray repeaters are neutron stars associated with supernova remnants.^[12][13] This discovery eventually led to the understanding that neutron stars with extremely high magnetic field called magnetars are the soft gamma-ray repeaters.^[14]

Caltech-NRAO team which he led showed in 1997 that gamma-ray bursts came from extra-galactic sources,^[15] and identified optical counterparts.^[16] Their research initiated the detailed studies of the sources of gamma-ray bursts along with the European team led by Jan van Paradijs.

He was also a member of the Caltech team that observed the first irrefutable brown dwarf in 1994 that orbited around a star called Gliese 229.^[17]

His recent work involved Palomar Transient Factory which has succeeded in identifying the new groups of optical transients such as superluminous supernovae,^[18] calcium-rich supernovae,^[19] and luminous red novae.^[20][21]

Some of the awards he has received include the following:

• NSF's Alan T. Waterman Award in 1992^[22]
• Helen B. Warner Prize from the American Astronomical Society in 1991^[23]
• Jansky Prize in 2002^[24]
• Dan David Prize in 2017^[25][26]
• Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2026 ^[27]

In 2015, he received an honorary doctorate from Radboud University in the Netherlands.^[28] In 2024, he was awarded the Shaw Prize in Astronomy.^[29][30]

Kulkarni has been the Jury Chair for the Infosys Prize for the discipline of Physical Sciences since 2009.^[31] The prize is awarded by the Infosys Foundation, whose founder is Kulkarni's brother-in-law, Narayana Murthy.

Kulkarni is a member of four national academies. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, London, in 2001,^[1][32] a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2003,^[33] an honorary fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences in 2012,^[34] and a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences on 12 September 2016.^[35][36]