Prof Archana Pai is a Professor at the Department of Physics, IIT Bombay. She obtained her bachelor’s from Ruparel College and secured her Master’s in Physics from IIT Bombay. Subsequently, she did a Ph.D. from the Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune in Gravitational Wave astronomy. Post-PhD, she was a postdoctoral fellow at several renowned international groups. For example, she was a Henri Poincare Fellow at the Observatory of Nice, France, an INFN Fellow at the University of Rome, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Albert Einstein Institute, in Germany. Her broad research interests are developing signal detection algorithms for gravitational wave transients, multi-messenger astronomy and testing Einstein’s theory against observations. She is a chair of LIGO India Scientific Collaboration — a multi-institutional pan-India group of scientists who work with LIGO Scientific Collaboration. She has received several recognitions such as the N. R. Sen Young Scientist Award, the Peraiah Foundation Lecture Award, and the Vaidya Raychaudhuri Lecture Award, and shared the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the Gruber Prize in Cosmology with the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

Prof. Siddhesh Kamat is currently an Associate Professor, a Swarna Jayanti Fellow, and an EMBO Young Investigator in the Department of Biology at IISER Pune. Prof. Kamat completed his BTech from the Institute of Chemical Technology (former UDCT) in 2007, and a PhD from the Department of Chemistry at Texas A&M University in 2012. Prof. Kamat was the 9th Irving S. Sigal Postdoctoral Fellow of the American Chemical Society at the Department of Chemical Physiology, The Scripps Research Institute. He joined IISER Pune in 2016, and is the chairperson, National Facility for Gene Function in the Health and Disease at IISER Pune. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He was awarded the Infosys Prize in Life Sciences in 2024.

Prof. Sandip Trivedi is a Theoretical Physicist with interests in Cosmology Particle Physics and String Theory. He obtained his Master’s degree in 1985 from IIT Kanpur, and his Ph.D. in 1990 from Caltech, USA. He has carried out research at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He joined TIFR in 1999 where he is currently a Distinguished Professor. From 2015-2020 he served as Director of TIFR. He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, The Indian National Science Academy and The World Academy of Science. Prof. Trivedi is a recipient of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar prize, the Infosys prize and The World Academy of Sciences Prize in the Physical Sciences.