Outreach

Promoting science and spreading awareness should go hand in hand with scientific development. During my time as an undergrad at IIT Madras, I was fortunate to be part of several outreach activities as part of Horizon: the physics and astronomy club.

Talks and workshops

I love giving talks. Talks are one of the effective ways of communicaating your research. During my undergrad, I got to organize several lecture presentations and workshops. Below is a list of some of them.

• Relativity and Gravitation, Horizon summer school 2021, March 2020
• Physics of Compact Stars, Boltzmann Session, April 2020
• Analysis of Globular Clusters Using Colour-Magnitude Diagrams. Shaastra 2020, IITM, Jan 2020
• Universe on your computer, Sampark Workshop 2019, Oct 2019
• Surfing gravitational waves, Astro Week, Aug 2019
• An introduction to Astronomy, Sep 2018

Lectures on Youtube

I made a set of lectures on Python for Astronomy that aims to teach application of Python programming language in various aspects of Astronomy research. I could cover topics such as handling FITS files, making Color-Magnitude diagrams, curve-fitting and modeling data. The video playlist is available here.

I wish to extend this series further sometime this year (2022). I am also looking forward to add more of my lectures on Youtube as online content gets the maximum amount of reach.

Trips and Observation sessions

The most fun I had during my undergrad was during our club’s trip to the Vainu Bappu Observatory, and about 3 hours drive from Chennai. A trip to VBO was an annual ritual for our club and we had lots of fun taking countless photos of the night sky, seeing Milky Way in its full glory and operating the 14-inch telescope at the observatory.

We also keep observation session at IITM for the student body and for the general public during Shaastra (IITM’s tech fest). We had over 1000 footfall for our 2018 lunar eclipse event ! Checkout the club website for photos.