Supriya Chakrabarti headshot

Supriya Chakrabarti, Ph.D.

Professor and Director

Department
Physics and Applied Physics, HEROES
Phone
978-934-3287
Office
Olney Hall 135

Expertise

Space experiments, Hyperspectral imaging from UV to near IR, Lidar.

Research Interests

Exoplanet, Interstellar medium, Planetary atmosphere, Instrumentation.

Education

Professor Chakrabarti earned his B.E. from the University of Calcutta and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. During his graduate study, Professor Chakrabarti built a sounding rocket payload for auroral studies, participated in the development of a spectrograph flown aboard the U. S. Air Force STP78-1 satellite, and analyzed data from this spacecraft and the UV telescope aboard the Apollo-Soyuz Test Program.

Biosketch

A year after obtaining his Ph.D., Professor Chakrabarti joined the Space Sciences Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley as a Senior Fellow and initiated a research program in terrestrial and planetary atmospheric studies. While there, he participated in one space shuttle and several satellite missions and started a sounding rocket program in Astrophysics that continues today.
In 1992, Professor Chakrabarti joined Boston University where his group developed and launched a small satellite for upper atmospheric research. Under his guidance, five undergraduate students wrote a successful proposal to NASA to build and fly a sounding rocket experiment. His research team developed new instruments and techniques for challenging tasks such as sunlit auroras, the prediction of ionospheric disturbances (space weather) and the characterization of interplanetary hydrogen and interstellar dust.
From 1997 to 2009 Professor Chakrabarti served as the Director of the Center for Space Physics, a most productive research enterprise at Boston University. During this period, the Center established itself as a national leader in space research following a deliberate and carefully planned strategy.
Professor Chakrabarti served on various advisory boards, professional panels and as the guest editor for technical journals and several conference proceedings. He has authored or co-authored over 160 scholarly articles and was awarded a U.S. patent for a UV detector. In Fall 2012, Professor Chakrabarti’s research group moved to the University of Massachusetts, Lowell where the group develops instrumentation for assessing carbon content in forests, solar-terrestrial interactions and direct imaging of exoplanets and conducts scientific studies of galaxies and upper atmospheres.