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Shri Kulkarni receives Royal Astronomical Society’s Gold Medal
The medal, awarded annually since 1824, is the highest recognition given by the society.
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Malvika Choudhary - Sat, 10, Jan 2026
- 14:35 EST
- 47
Shri Kulkarni / caltech.edu
Indian American astronomer Shri Kulkarni has been awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the organization’s highest honor.
Kulkarni, the George Ellery Hale Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science at the California Institute of Technology, received the medal for what the society said in its citation are his “sustained, innovative and ground-breaking contributions to multi-wavelength transient astrophysics.”
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Kulkarni’s career has been marked by discoveries that have helped shape modern time-domain astronomy, the study of how celestial objects change over time. In 1982, while still a graduate student, he co-discovered the first millisecond pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star.
Since joining Caltech in 1985, he has been involved in the discovery and study of a wide range of cosmic phenomena, including brown dwarfs, gamma-ray bursts and fast radio bursts.
In 1995, Kulkarni and his colleagues identified the first brown dwarf, a class of objects smaller and cooler than stars. Two years later, his team demonstrated that powerful gamma-ray bursts originate outside the Milky Way, a finding that transformed scientific understanding of these events.
In 2020, he helped identify the first fast radio burst detected within the Milky Way, strengthening the link between such bursts and highly magnetized neutron stars known as magnetars.
He also led the development of the Palomar Transient Factory and its successor, the Zwicky Transient Facility, survey projects that monitor the sky for short-lived and changing cosmic events.
The Royal Astronomical Society noted that the two projects “have revolutionised time domain astrophysics at optical wavelengths.” The Zwicky Transient Facility, based at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory near San Diego, continues to scan the entire northern sky every two nights.
Kulkarni has emphasized the role of instrumentation in driving discovery.
Speaking at Caltech’s 2024 Watson Lecture titled “Illuminating the Dynamic Night Sky: Discoveries from the Zwicky Transient Facility,” he said, “My motto has been to build a big enough gizmo and things will happen.” Over the course of his career, he has been involved in building 10 scientific instruments.
He is currently working on several major projects, including NASA’s planned Ultraviolet Explorer (UVEX) mission, led by Caltech physicist Fiona Harrison and targeted for launch in 2030, which aims to carry out the most sensitive ultraviolet sky survey to date.
He is also the principal investigator of Z-Shooter, a new spectrometer being developed for the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawai‘i, with first light expected in 2029.
Over the years, Kulkarni has received numerous honors, including the Shaw Prize, the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award and the Dan David Prize. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of London, the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Kulkarni was born in Maharashtra, India. He earned his master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 1978 and his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1983.
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