$250K Infosys Visiting Chair Professorship

March 01, 2023

Dr. Arif Babul, University of Victoria Distinguished Professor and Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, has been named Infosys Visiting Chair Professor in Mathematics and Physics at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru, India. Endowed by the Infosys Foundation, the prestigious international research professorships bring internationally renowned scientists to IISc to to foster intense research collaboration in cutting-edge areas.  

“I am deeply honoured to receive this award,” says Babul. “I look forward to rebooting emerging collaborations interrupted by the pandemic. My host, Prof. Prateek Sharma, and I were planning a state-of-the-art numerical simulations campaign investigating a new way to model heating and cooling in galaxy groups when the pandemic hit. And I am especially excited about pushing forward a nascent project studying potentially detectable gravitational waves from merging supermassive black holes in galaxies hundreds of millions of light years away, a brand new topic for me!”  

Babul is an exceptionally versatile astrophysicist who has advanced extragalactic astrophysics across a diverse range of research fronts, from galaxy formation and supermassive black holes to gravitational lensing and cosmic reionization.  He is a foremost authority on the assembly and evolution of galaxy groups and clusters, and is internationally recognized for his original and prescient contributions in the area over the past two decades. In two recent rankings, Babul ranked among the top 5% globally.

Babul’s Visiting Chair Professorship – valued at about $250,000 CDN – will begin in May 2023 and will see Babul spend up to twelve months at IISc over the next three years.