Malda girl who assisted Physics Nobel-Prize winners this year

You must have heard recently about US astrophysicists Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne, jointly winning Nobel Prize for Physics for contribution to the LIGO detector and observation of gravitational waves. What many of you may not know however, is that Nairwita Mazumder, an ex-student of Mathematics department of Jadavpur University, was a part of a team who helped these stalwarts of Physics exhibit their acumen.

A Bengali by birth, Nairwita Mazumder hails from Malda, born into a middle-class family. Studious as she was, she completed both her BSc and MSc from Jadavpur University with specialization in Mathematical Physics. Her focus area had always been Cosmology, related to different models of expanding universe. But in pursuit to do something other than theory, she worked with ace organizations such as IUCAA and IISER Trivandrum as Post-Doctoral fellow and rubbed shoulders with renowned scientists from LIGO in a scientific collaboration with India. 

Then there was no looking back for her as she established her credentials on a larger canvas. Her journey in LIGO Hangford Observatory started in January 2016 under this year’s Noble Prize winners, Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne and it continues to open new horizons of theories. Nairwita had her fair share in helping these stalwarts discover how any emergence of violence in the astrophysical activities at a distant universe, can create ripples in the space-time, that can be captured with super sensitive instruments. Perceptively, it perpetuates the theory of ripples in the fabric of space-time, first proposed by Albert Einstein which got the astrophysicists reeling with ideas and finally the Nobel Prize.