Hello! I am Kishore Patra, a Nagaraj-Noll-Otellini Graduate Fellow working with Alex Filippenko and Wenbin Lu in the Department of Astronomy at University of California Berkeley. I am broadly interested in astrophysics with current focus on transient events including supernova explosions, tidal disruption events, X-ray quasi-periodic eruptions and fast radio bursts. I have a specialized expertise in the technique of measuring polarization as a function of light wavelength (spectropolarimetry).

Before coming to Berkeley, I graduated with a B.Sc. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018. At MIT, I worked with Josh Winn and Nevin Weinberg on the search for orbital decay in exoplanets.

I grew up in a little village on the eastern coast of India before moving to the UK, and then to the US for higher education. I spend most weekends playing cricket across northern California. I like to try new hobbies - these days I’m into learning chess, reading about development economics, and exploring maps.

Contact

kcpatra@berkeley.edu

You can read some of my random musings and occasional writings below.

The Green Chillies

The following is a slightly edited version of a short story I wrote a few years ago and won one of the MIT Ilona Karmel writing prizes for it. [Read More]

The Lebesgue Dominated Convergence Theorem

The lecturer wrote in large bold letters “Lebesgue Dominated Convergence Theorem” on the board. He then went on to fill the board with dxs, dks, integrals, tildes, hats, fs and gs. In the distance I heard a speeding train – faint at first, but gradually becoming louder and louder until it drowned the instructor’s soft words. I heard the metallic clanking – clickety-clack, clickety-clack – and the hoot-hoot along with the unyielding chug-chug. Then the guard’s shrill whistle followed by... [Read More]