Gautham Narayan

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Assistant Professor

Gautham Narayan has been faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign since 2019, and has worked with the multiple Rubin science collaborations since 2013, particularly the Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC) where he is the Analysis Coordinator. He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University, and moved to Tucson for a postdoc at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (now NSF’s NOIRLab) where he helped develop Rubin’s ANTARES broker. He was the Barry M. Lasker Data Science Fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute, and helped create the largest simulations of the LSST time-domain sky, along with algorithms for transient detection and characterization. 

His main scientific interests are at the intersection of time-domain and multi-messenger astrophysics, cosmology, and AI and data science with large surveys. He works on discovering rare and unusual transient phenomena, modeling the physics of supernovae and understanding their progenitors and how they are influenced by and influence their host galaxies, and using type Ia supernovae for cosmological inference. He is PI of the Scalable Infrastructure of Multi-messenger Astrophysics (SCIMMA.org) team, co-PI on the Young Supernova Experiment, and the first Simonyi NSF CAREER Fellow.