I am a PhD Student at (The Open University), UK. I am working with Dr Jo Barstow on exploring the atmospheres of Venus-like exoplanets with JWST. The focus of my PhD is on performing atmospheric retrievals on transmission and emission spectra of exoplanet atmospheres, leveraging both JWST observations and synthetic datasets. The process of retrievals consists of creating numerous forward models and comparing them to observations to solve the inverse problem of constraining the atmospheric properties of exoplanets. I have also contributed to the open-source software NEMESISPY, a Python adaptation of NEMESIS, which has a rich history of modelling Solar System atmospheres.
I joined IISER Kolkata as a BS MS student after high school. Here, I gained a foundation in the basic sciences from the interdisciplinary nature of studies in my first few years and later chose physics as a major. In the summer after my second year, I attended an Introductory Summer School in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune and learned about the various fields of research in astrophysics. That year, I also worked with Dr. Bhargav Vaidya at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Indore on radiative transfer simulations for AGNs.
In the summer after my third year, I received the MITACS Globalink Research Internship funding to work with Dr. Nicolas Cowan at the McGill Space Institute, Montreal. During this project, I adapted analytical models for incident light maps used in binary star systems for application to exoplanets. I also attended the Canadian Astronomical Society (CASCA) Annual Meeting in 2019 and learned about current research in exoplanets. For my master's thesis, I worked with Dr Dibyendu Nandi at IISER Kolkata to review current techniques of atmospheric characterisation of exoplanets.
Other than astronomy, I love swimming and enjoy reading sci-fi and fantasy fiction.