Priyamvada Natarajan

Priyamvada Natarajan was born in Coimbatore, India, to academic parents who encouraged her scientific curiosity. When she was young, her father gave her a computer that she used to map the night sky — her first foray into scientific research. Natarajan earned bachelor’s degrees in physics and mathematics and a master’s degree in science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a PhD in theoretical astrophysics from the University of Cambridge. She is currently a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University and director of the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities.

Natarajan is celebrated for probing the nature of dark matter and dark energy and for developing models that describe the assembly and growth of black holes. To demystify science for the public, she wrote the book Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos, which author Richard Holmes called “a strikingly lucid account of the expansion, not just of the universe, but of the way we have tried to understand it” in The New York Times.

The recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Emeline Bigelow Conland Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Natarajan was named one of Time magazine’s most influential people in 2024. She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Astronomical Society and the 2025 recipient of the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics, awarded jointly by the American Institute of Physics and the American Astronomical Society.

Natarajan has worked to make her profession more inclusive. “I think that for most women of color, there are ways big and small in which we are somehow invisible and marginalized,” she told the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has chaired committees including the Women’s Faculty Forum at Yale and advocated for double-blind research proposal reviews, which help prevent biases in funding.