Mayuresh Surnis

I did my B. Sc. (Physics) from Fergusson College in Pune, in 2008, and my M. Sc. (Physics) from the Department of Physics, University of Pune, in 2010. I finished my Ph. D. in radio pulsar search and timing with Dr. B. C. Joshi at NCRA, Pune in January 2017.

Currently, I am working as a post-doctoral fellow in time domain astropysics. My work involves searching for FRBs, the cosmological beacons which shine through for a very short period of time and can be detected by giant radio telescopes like the Arecibo Observatory or the Green Bank Observatory.

Things I Do

Here are my research interests. The list is not meant to be exhaustive. I am generally interested in transient radio stuff including RRATs, bursting magnetars, AXPs

• Pulsar search and timing

Pulsars are very fascinating celestial objects which have very extreme physical conditions, which enables us to study plasma physics, gravitational physics etc. at the extreme limits. They are also very stable rotators. This clock-like stability can be exploited to study a variety of phenomena associated with their coherent radio emission. Apart from studying the pulsars themselves, pulsar timing also allows for other interesting implications like the ongoing international pulsar timing array (IPTA). I am interested in discovering new pulsars and characterising them to add to the existing population.

• Computational resources for pulsar search

I am also interested in the development of parallel computation, which is the heart of pulsar searches. I have also developed my own parallel pipeline for running pulsar search on the high performance cluster (HPC) environments.

• Imaging studies of peculiar pulsars

The recently discovered intermittent pulsars present unique observing challenges because of the varied time scales (from ~10-15 days to ~2-3 years) of the cessation of coherent pulsed emission. Imaging studies done in the OFF states using telescopes like the GMRT, give simultaneous imaging data, which is helpful in monitoring the continuum emission (if present) from these sources. In addition, such studies done on very long nulling pulsars, have the potential of revealing more details of the enigmatic pulsar magnetosphere.

A Few Accomplishments

Count your achievements in terms of how many lives you changed, not how much money you earned !

Became a KVPY Fellow

I was awarded the prestigious Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana (KVPY) fellowship from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, in 2006.

Became a life member of the ASI

I became a life time member of the Astronomical Society of India (ASI) in 2015.