Cosmologist Awarded J. Michael McQuade Fellowship in Physics

As an aerospace engineer at the Indian Space Research Organization, Kuldeep Sharma modeled launch vehicles for structural dynamics analysis.

Now a doctoral student in Carnegie Mellon University, Sharma has pivoted to studying the universe itself rather than the methods to get humans into space.

"My interest started shifting toward astronomy during undergraduate (at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology)," said Sharma who earned his master's degree in astronomy at Leiden University prior to joining Carnegie Mellon's Department of Physics. "It felt like addressing an existential question of humankind that we have been thinking about for many centuries."

Sharma works with Carl Rodriguez, a former assistant professor of physics and member of the McWilliams Center for Cosmology who recently joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina. Sharma recently relocated to North Carolina and will continue to work with Rodriguez as a Carnegie Mellon student using Cluster Monte Carlo code and LIGO evidence.

Their work focuses on gravitational waves, ripples in spacetime that were first observed by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2015. Rodriguez is particularly interested in the dynamics and evolution of stars and star clusters, and what the gravitational waves they create can reveal about stars and galaxies across cosmic time.

"Kuldeep is an excellent researcher who uses computational techniques to study the collisions of massive stars and the massive black holes they create," Rodriguez said. "His work will play a key role in our understanding of the formation of massive black holes and the gravitational waves they produce."

"I'm looking at one aspect of the collisions of individual stars in certain regions where the densities of stars are very high, which leads to the formation of massive stars and then the formation of massive black holes," Sharma said, who previously worked under the supervision of then-Carnegie Mellon Assistant Professor Sergey Koposov on mass estimation of the Large Magellanic Cloud using the proper motion data of Blue Horizontal Branch stars from Gaia.

For his research efforts, Sharma received the J. Michael McQuade Fellowship in Physics.

"I'm very grateful and thankful that I'm here at Carnegie Mellon," Sharma said. "The university has been very generous during my studies, and this fellowship will let me focus on research."