People
The Lightcurve team
Researchers, advisors, and staff working across helioseismology, asteroseismology, exoplanets, and Earth's interior at TIFR, Mumbai.
Advisory Board
Senior advisors guiding the group's scientific direction.
Arpita Roy
Bio coming soon — written by the advisor.
Jørgen Christensen-Dalsgaard
Bio coming soon — written by the advisor.
Shrinivas Kulkarni
Bio coming soon — written by the advisor.
Karthikeyan Shanmugam
Bio coming soon — written by the advisor.
Bharat Kaul
Bio coming soon — written by the advisor.
Principal Investigator
Shravan Hanasoge
Principal Investigator
Shravan Hanasoge joined the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, as a faculty member in 2013. He received his Ph.D. at Stanford University, where he worked with the Solar Group on developing computational techniques to enable the seismology of the solar interior. He then pursued a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max-Planck Institute for Solar System Research and the Department of Geosciences, Princeton University, with appointments as a visiting scholar at Courant Institute of Mathematical Science and an Associate fellow of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science.
Current team
Postdocs, PhDs, Junior Research Fellows, and scientific staff.
Postdocs
Meenakshi Gaira
Postdoctoral Researcher
Meenakshi's research focuses on the asteroseismology of evolved stars — from subgiants to red giants. She applies a combination of machine learning and classical techniques to study their internal structure and evolution.
Bhaskar Illa
Postdoctoral Researcher
Bhaskar is currently working on homogenization of the seismic wave equation using renormalization group theory and high-dimensional optimization through reinforcement learning. He was a visiting researcher at the Earthquake Research Institute, University of Tokyo, where he carried out research in fiber-optic seismology. He received his PhD from CSIR-NGRI for research in anisotropic seismic tomography applied to terrestrial seismology.
Anohita Mallick
Postdoctoral Researcher
Anohita's research focuses on asteroseismology, particularly the study of granulation and convection in evolved stars. She works on linking seismic observables with spectroscopic parameters to better constrain stellar structure and evolution.
Hemapriya Raju
Postdoctoral Researcher
Hemapriya is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and solar physics. Her research focuses on understanding and forecasting space weather disturbances such as solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and solar wind — including the probability of their emergence and arrival at Earth — to help protect space and ground-based infrastructure.
PhDs
Anoop Gavankar
PhD Student
Anoop is utilizing machine learning for radial velocity analysis of solar spectra to recover injected Keplerian signals. Currently, he focuses on applying AI to time-series analysis of stellar lightcurves and transit detection to analyze stellar periodicities. Broadly, his research centres on exoplanet detection using transit and RV methods in low signal regimes.
Nipun Ghanghas
PhD Student
Nipun's work focuses on asteroseismic analysis of solar-like pulsating stars using machine learning techniques. More broadly, his research interests extend to understanding stellar structure, evolution, and galactic archaeology, leveraging data from current and next-generation space surveys.
Shatanik Bhattacharya
PhD Student
Shatanik is working primarily on red giant star asteroseismology. His work focuses on theoretical magneto-asteroseismology across post-main-sequence solar-like oscillators, and the application of machine learning methods like supervised learning and reinforcement learning to rapidly excavate stellar information from power spectra obtained by telescopes like Kepler and TESS.
Arnab Pradhan
Integrated MSc-PhD
Arnab has started working in helioseismology. He did his bachelors from St. Xavier's College, Kolkata with a major in physics. And he is currently pursuing his Integrated MSc-PhD in Astrophysics from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai.
Junior Research Fellows
Rajarshi Barman
Junior Research Fellow
Rajarshi is working on red giant asteroseismology and stellar rotation. He enjoys working with large observational datasets and applying machine learning and deep learning methods to understand what stars are trying to tell us about their internal physics. In general, he is interested in almost anything that emits light — which conveniently includes most of the universe.
Jharnesh Verma
Junior Research Fellow
Jharnesh is working on the application of ML methods in asteroseismology. He has a BS-MS Dual Degree graduate (2025) from IISER Pune, and completed his master's thesis project at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru, in the field of Solar Physics.
Tarun Jangiyani
Junior Research Fellow
Tarun's research focuses on asteroseismology, where he performs computational modeling of stellar oscillation modes (l = 0, 1, 2) using MCMC-based methods to probe the internal structure of stars. He holds a Master's degree in Astrophysics and is broadly interested in the application of machine learning techniques to data-driven problems in the field.
Harikrishnan
Junior Research Fellow
Harikrishnan specializes in the intersection of asteroseismology, stellar astrophysics and advanced computational modeling. His research is centered on understanding stars by bringing together theoretical modeling and real observational data. He works with stellar evolution and oscillation codes like MESA and GYRE, and he builds computational pipelines that connect these models to observed light curves. A big part of his work involves using unsupervised learning and Gaussian Process optimization to explore complex parameter spaces and estimate stellar properties such as age.
Scientific Staff
Avik Dasgupta
Science Communication Manager
Avik focuses on low-cost, accessible hands-on activities and methods to take astronomy to the grassroot students and communities. Previously, he developed the Planetarium program and Science Centre at SGT University, and as Program Officer–Scientist at VASCSC, Ahmedabad, established an astronomy lab serving 2000+ students and 200+ teachers annually, where he also coordinated the implementation of 197 ISRO Space Clubs across India. Overall he has 9 years of experience of working in Astronomy education and communication.
Asitang Mishra
AI Research Engineer
Asitang Mishra is a NASA Space Act Award-winning Data Scientist and TEDx speaker with deep experience applying AI and Machine Learning across industrial and interdisciplinary research. Before joining the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) as an AI Researcher, he spent over a decade building machine learning and automation solutions for organizations including NASA, Caltech, DARPA, the US Department of Homeland Security, and Chevron. He has since advised research teams across India, including ISRO and IUCAA Pune, on integrating Large Language Models and agentic AI workflows. His expertise spans LLMs, agentic workflows, Natural Language Processing, knowledge graphs, and graph-based algorithms.