Campus Directory

Pronouns he/him

Division Physical & Biological Sciences Division

Department/College/Unit Astronomy & Astrophysics Department

Title Postdoctoral Scholar

Affiliation Staff

Staff Type Postdoctoral Scholar

Areas of Expertise Astronomy
Astrophysics

Web Site

Primary Office Location Interdisciplinary Sciences Building
123

Mail Stop UCO / Lick Observatory

Biography, Education and Training

Hello! I am Kishore Patra, a postdoctoral researcher at the UC Observatories at UC Santa Cruz, working with Prof. Ryan Foley. I am also an affiliate researcher at the Department of Astronomy at UC Berkeley. My research broadly spans astrophysics, with a current focus on transient events such as supernova explosions, tidal disruption events, and X-ray quasi-periodic eruptions. I specialize in the technique of spectropolarimetry, which involves measuring polarization as a function of light wavelength.

I earned my PhD from UC Berkeley in 2024, where I worked with Profs. Alex Filippenko and Wenbin Lu. I also hold a B.Sc. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I worked with Profs. Josh Winn and Nevin Weinberg on the search for orbital decay in exoplanets.

I grew up in a small village on the eastern coast of India before moving to the UK and then to the US for higher education. I spend most weekends playing cricket across Northern California. I enjoy trying out new hobbies; currently, I am learning chess, reading about development economics, and exploring maps.