Dr Poorna Mysoor wins Dame Anne Warburton Award
Lucy Cavendish Fellow, Dr Poorna Mysoor, shares her thoughts on the award and her research.
Dr Suhail Dhawan’s research is based on measuring distances to exploding stars to infer how fast the universe is expanding.
Dr Suhail Dhawan is a Marie Sklodowska Curie Individual European Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, and works at the Kavli Institute for Cosmology, Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge.
His research is based on measuring distances to exploding stars, typically a class of explosions called Type Ia supernovae, to infer how fast the universe is expanding. He is also interested in using the phenomena that light bends around massive objects, called strong gravitational lensing, to understand the nature of gravity.
Suhail was born in New Delhi where he did his undergraduate degree before moving to London for a Masters in Astrophysics. He was fortunate to study for his PhD in Garching near Munich in Germany, at the European Southern Observatory and Technical University Munich. From 2016 to 2020 he has been working in Stockholm as a postdoc. When he is not working Suhail likes science outreach, doing stand up comedy and artisanal coffee.
The College award is possible thanks to the generosity of Dame Anne Warburton, Britain's first female Ambassador and 4th President of Lucy Cavendish College, and goes each year to one of our Fellows or Research Fellows engaged in original research and in need of financial support.
Dr Dhawan comments, “This award will enable me to attend a workshop in Stockholm on supernova experiments in the nearby and distant universe. Both experiments, the Zwicky Transient Facility and the Dark Energy Survey have assembled an exquisite dataset of a special class of supernovae of Type Ia, which are important to measure distances and hence, the expansion rate of the universe as well as its acceleration, to understand what dark energy is. I will present my recent work on measuring the Hubble constant and its directional dependence at the workshop and benefit from inter-collaboration discussions on future work for precision measurements of the cosmic distance scale.
I am very excited to receive the award and would like to thank the committee as well as the college for providing a wonderful learning environment to carry out my research.”