Prof Niranjan Thatte

I grew up in Mumbai, and studied for my Bachelor’s degree at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Subsequently, I obtained my Doctoral degree at the University of California at Berkeley in 1993, and moved to Munich to work at the Max Planck Institute for extraterrestrial Physics, first as a post-doctoral researcher, and then as a staff scientist. Since 2003, I have been a member of the Physics faculty at Oxford. I have been teaching at LMH since 2010.

My research focus is astronomical instrumentation. I am Principal Investigator for HARMONI, the first light spectrograph for the European Extremely Large Telescope being built by the European Southern Observatory. I am also PI of the SWIFT integral Field Spectrograph, a common-user facility at the Palomar 200 inch telescope. My scientific research focus is on nuclear regions of galaxies, and on direct imaging of extra-solar planets. For more details see my departmental page.

I tutor physics undergraduates in Optics (1st and 2nd year) and Mechanics and Special Relativity (1st year). I also tutor the Foundation Year STEM students in Mathematics. I supervise graduate students working in Astronomical Instrumentation & integral field spectroscopic observations.