29th Annual Report (2016-17)

12 (May 23, 2017) This has been a year of very intense activity and excitement for researchers at IUCAA. The academicmembers of IUCAA continue to make significant contributions to research in Astronomy, Astrophysics and related subjects, and to organise and participate in meetings and workshops all over the country and indeed all over the world. Over the last academic year, ten new research scholars and six new Postdoctoral fellows have joined out Institute, while six IUCAA scholars have obtained Ph.D. degrees. The 93 academic members at IUCAA, including faculty, postdoctoral fellows and students, have published 182 peer- reviewed papers, with a mean impact factor of 5.4. I am very proud of this statistic, since it shows that my colleagues are not just very productive in their research, but they are making a substantial impact on the subject. Even more gratifying is the fact that the 144 Visiting associates of IUCAA, who are faculty members at Indian Universities and Colleges, supported in their research by IUCAA, have published 158 peer-reviewed papers during the same period. This clearly indicates the impact IUCAAhas had in promoting and nurturingAstrophysics research at institutions of higher education all over the country. Following the discovery of gravitational waves during the previous year by the LIGO-VIRGO Consortium, using the two LIGO observatories in the USA, successful detections have continued, in which members of the group built by Professor Sanjeev Dhurandhar in the early 1990s at IUCAA, many of whom are now in charge of their own groups all over the country, continue to play leading roles. The Indian consortium for gravitational wave research, INDIGO, which includes 37 authors of the discovery paper, was also formed and consolidated at IUCAA. This activity will of course continue to grow, as IUCAA has now assumed the role of one of the apex institutes in charge of building, installing and running the first LIGO detector outside the USA, which will be on Indian soil. IUCAA has led the exercise to select the site for the LIGO-India observatory, and is now actively involved in the acquisition and characterization of the site. The computational infrastructure for current LIGO data reduction, as well as constructing the data-crunching capacity for the future observatory, is also being developed at IUCAA. At the same time, we are in charge of building the human resources for all activities starting from the installation to the scientific operations of LIGO-India. I am proud to say that the UGC has granted us a large number of faculty and technical positions, in this first phase, to augment our capacity to support this prestigious project of National importance. India's first space-borne multi-wavelength astronomical observatory ASTROSAT was launched by ISRO during 2015-16, and since then, activities withASTROSAT have been a significant feature of IUCAA's research landscape. This includes scientific and technical contributions to all the payloads on this satellite, and well as the establishment of the ASTROSAT Science Support Cell at IUCAA, supported by ISRO. This provides a unique opportunity for University students and faculty, and IUCAA members and associates, to carry out their scientific research with ASTROSAT. Workshops are being held at regular intervals at IUCAA and elsewhere at DIRECTOR'S REPORT 29 th ANNUAL RE PORT 2016-17