Kishalay De, Ph.D.

Kishalay De is an Associate Research Scientist at the Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) and an assistant professor in the Department of Astronomy at Columbia University. De works with wide-field imaging surveys on the ground and in space to search for variability and outbursts from the violent births, mergers and deaths of stars. De has a particular long-standing interest in piecing together a complete roadmap of the lives of stars in binary systems — ranging from planets orbiting stars to stars orbiting black holes — by observing them in the most poorly understood phases where they undergo eruptive mass transfer and produce spectacular eruptions visible across the universe. To this end, De has been pushing frontiers of the time domain exploration in the infrared sky by applying new computational techniques to archival datasets as well as developing data processing techniques for novel technologies on ground-based telescopes.

De obtained his undergraduate degree in physics from the Indian Institute of Science in 2016, followed by a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology in 2021. De was subsequently a NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow and Kavli Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until 2024. De’s work has been recognized with the Neugebauer fellowship and Clauser Thesis Prize from the California Institute of Technology, and dissertation prize of the High Energy Astrophysics division of the American Astronomical Society and the International Astronomical Union.