Banibrata Mukhopadhyay is an Indian Scientist/Astrophysicist and a professor of Physics at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, born at Kolkatta, India to Pulak Mukhopadhyay, a biologist, and Tapati Mukhopadhyay, an academician. Mukhopadhyay's mother tongue is Bengali. Mukhopadhyay's work with his student Upasana Das has identified a mechanism to allow significantly super-Chandrasekhar white dwarfs to exist without collapsing into neutron stars, which could explain the origin of over-luminous type Ia supernovae. He has also proposed a solution to the century-old problem of the origin of linear instability and subsequent turbulence and matter transport in Rayleigh-stable pure hydrodynamical shear flows, which could explain turbulence in accretion disks. His another work is able predict the spin of black holes.
Profession
Mukhopadhyay finished primary schooling from Collins Institute and then studied at Mitra Institution where from he finished class X and class XII. Both the schools are in central Kolkata, where he grew up. Mukhopadhyay has stated that his school days were perhaps the most inspiring days, in particular in class X to class XII, when he became very close to his teacher Kumar Krishna Chowdhury and believes that his teacher, Kumar Krishna Chowdhury's affectionate training has made him what he is today. He also remembers that there were many other highly affectionate teachers in his school life as well. Mukhopadhyay studied at the renowned Scottish Church College. One of the various reasons that Mukhopadhyay states for choosing to study in that college was that Swami Vivekananda and Netaji Subhas Bose had studied there. It was during the third year of college days that Mukhopadhyay started inclining to gravitational physics compared to other branches of physics. In this college, Mukhopadhyay found some inspiring teachers. During this time only, he started getting influenced by his maternal uncle, a botanist, Arun Banerjee. Mukhopadhyay did his postgraduation from the Rajabazar Science College of the University of Calcutta, when he started, and was determined, to take relativity, gravitational physics, astrophysics as a part of his research career. Here he found inspirational teachers including Amitava Raychaudhuri. Subsequently, Mukhopadhyay joined the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics to do his PhD research. However, Mukhopadhyay received his PhD from the S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences under the supervision of Sandip Chakrabarti. Subsequently, after spending sometime in India and abroad, Mukhopadhyay joined in Harvard University and worked with Ramesh Narayan, along with others. After that Mukhopadhyay decided to come back India and, since 2006, he is working at the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, where currently he is an Associate Professor.
