Hello! I'm Tamojeet Roychowdhury, a first-year PhD student in Astronomy at the UC Berkeley. I'm currently working with Prof. Dan Stark on studying high-redshift galaxies and active galactic nuclei using the latest JWST spectra to understand the physical processes and environments shaping the earliest galaxies and stars in the Universe.
Before coming to the US, I did my B.Tech in Electrical Engineering (2021-25) from IIT Bombay, India, where I was awarded the President of India Gold Medal for having the highest CGPA among all undergrads. I was also a part of Krittika, the Astronomy club over there and helped organise several outreach events from public stargazing sessions, talks by scientists, and school student fairs, to astro trivia quizzes, Python training bootcamps, and mentored dedicated summer projects introducing students to computational astronomy research.
My interests primarily lie in UV-optical-infrared observational astronomy, and I analyse data and images from some of the largest telescopes in the world and in space to know more about the physical processes shaping our galaxy and the Universe. I started my journey by working on understanding the role of magnetic fields in star-forming clouds with Dr. Thushara Pillai at MIT Haystack. In summer 2024, I worked on finding the first mid-infrared flares in the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way's centre, at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy through a DAAD-WISE internship, and have had the opportunity to continue collaborating with the team (including scientists from MPIfR, Harvard and McGill universities) via two conferences at the International Space Science Institute in Bern, Switzerland. I have also worked on methods for searching for kilonovae using gravitational wave events from LIGO with Prof. Varun Bhalerao at IITB, on assessing whether a particular class of young stars are associated with nearby star-forming regions with Prof. Lynne Hillenbrand at Caltech, and on a couple of multi-armed bandit problems with Prof. Sharayu Moharir as part of my bachelor's thesis. A list of associated publications is below:
[First-author]:
1. A Survey of Magnetic Fields in Bok Globules
2. Efficacy of galaxy catalogues for following up gravitational wave events
3. Seeking Kinematic Association of Known FU Orionis Stars with Young Clusters in Cygnus
4. Kinematic Association of Two FU Orionis Stars with Young Clusters in Orion
5. Fixed-Confidence Best Arm Identification with Decreasing Variance
6. Photometric Constraints on Intermediate-mass Black Holes in the Galactic Centre
[Second-author/Significant Contribution]:
7. First Mid-infrared Detection and Modeling of a Flare from Sgr A*
8. Mid-infrared extinction toward the Galactic center
[Collaboration]:
9. Searching for Gravitational Wave Optical Counterparts with the Zwicky Transient Facility: Summary of O4a
10. First Mid-infrared Detection and Modeling of a Flare from Sgr A*. II. Mid-IR Spectral Energy Distribution and Millimeter Polarimetry
I am a part of Mensa International (with 99+ percentile IQ), and had the privilege to represent India at the International Olympiad of Astronomy and Astrophysics in my 12th grade, where our team stood third among 42 teams. This also gave me the opportunity to work with the Olympiad organising team through my undergrad years (creating and grading test questions and training students), first at the national level and later for the International Olympiad in August 2025 in Mumbai. I am now looking forward to growing as a researcher and learner through my years as a graduate student at UC Berkeley!
