Shrinivas Ramchandra Kulkarni was born on 4 October 1956 in the small town of Kurundwad in Maharashtra, into a Kannada speaking Deshastha Madhva Brahmin family. His father, Dr. R. H. Kulkarni, was a surgeon based in Hubballi and his mother, Vimala Kulkarni, was a devoted home-maker. He is one of four children and has three sisters, namely Sunanda Kulkarni, Sudha Murthy and Jaishree Deshpande. Kulkarni and his sisters grew up in Hubballi, Karnataka, and received their schooling at local schools there. He obtained his MS in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1978 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1983.
Career
In 1987, Kulkarni obtained a position as faculty at the California Institute of Technology. According to his website, he has mentored 64 young scholars by the end of 2016. Kulkarni is known for making key discoveries that open new sub-fields within astronomy, using wide range of wavelength in observation. ADS shows that his papers cover following fields: HI absorption studies of Milky Way Galaxy, pulsars, millisecond pulsars, and globular cluster pulsars, brown dwarfs and other sub-stellar objects, soft gamma-ray repeaters, gamma-ray bursts, and optical transients. He made significant contributions in these sub-fields of astronomy.
Key discoveries
Kulkarni started off his career as a radio astronomer. He studied Milky Way Galaxy using HI absorption under the guidance of his advisor Carl Heiles, and observed its four arms. The review articles he wrote with Carl Heiles have been highly cited in the field of interstellar medium. He discovered the first millisecond pulsar called PSR B1937+21 with Donald Backer and colleagues, while he was a graduate student. In 1986, he found the first optical counterpart of binary pulsars, while he was a Millikan Fellow at California Institute of Technology. He was instrumental in discovery of the first globular cluster pulsar in 1987 using a supercomputer. With Dale Frail at NRAO and Toshio Murakami and his colleagues at ISAS Kulkarni showed that soft gamma-ray repeaters are neutron stars associated with supernova remnants. This discovery eventually led to the understanding that neutron stars with extremely high magnetic field called magnetars are the soft gamma-ray repeaters. Caltech-NRAO team which he led showed in 1997 that gamma-ray bursts came from extra-galactic sources, and identified optical counterparts. Their research initiated the detailed studies of the sources of gamma-ray bursts along with the European team led by Jan van Paradijs. He was also a member of the Caltech team that observed the first irrefutable brown dwarf in 1994 that orbited around a star called Gliese 229. His recent work involved Palomar Transient Factory which has succeeded in identifying the new groups of optical transients such as superluminous supernova, calcium-rich supernova, and luminous red nova. The success of his astronomical research is evident by 63 Nature Letters, 7 Science Letters, and total of 479 refereed scientific articles that bear his name by the end of 2015, according to ADS. Recognizing his contribution to astronomy, he was awarded the Dan David Prize in 2017.
