Sujan Sengupta is a Senior Professor at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bangalore, a premier research institute under the Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India. After completing his undergraduate and post-graduation in Mathematics from Burdwan University, West Bengal, Dr. Sengupta joined IIA as a CSIR Research Fellow. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Physics, Bangalore University in 1997 on Astrophysics. After a brief period of postdoctoral research at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA, with a NASA fellowship, he returned to India and joined the same institute as a faculty in 2002. He was a visiting Associate Professor at Academia Sinica, Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Taipei, Taiwan from 2004, 2007-2008 and during 2011.
His research activities include the theory and observation of Extra-solar planets and Exomoons, Astrobiology, brown dwarfs, etc. He pioneered the polarimetric method for the detection and characterization of Exoplanets and Brown Dwarfs. Prof. Sujan Sengupta was one of the signatories along with the late Stephen Hawking, Prof. Frank Drake, Prof. Kip Thorne et al. of the Breakthrough Initiative project, established by Yuri Milner, that search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. He is an alumnus of Kavli Frontiers of Science, National Academy of Sciences, USA. He is a member of the International Astronomical Union. Besides publishing several research papers in the top international peer-reviewed journals, Prof. Sengupta has authored a popular book entitled “Worlds Beyond Our Own- The Search for Habitable Planets” published by Springer International. He has written a similar book in Bengali which was published by Ananda Publishers Private Ltd.
