Hi there!

I’m Kunal, a third year PhD student in Astronomy and Astrophysics in the group of Prof. Hugues Sana at the Institute of Astronomy, KU Leuven in Belgium. I am primarily an observational astronomer interested in massive binary stars, though with occasional detours into theory and low mass binaries. My thesis work has mainly focused on Wolf-Rayet stars and candidate single-degenerate massive binaries hosting compact objects. I am also actively involved in the BLOeM and SOUL collaborations where I also explore other evolutionary stages of massive stars.

I hail from the city of Pune, India (as do many astronomers, thanks to IUCAA). I did my undergraduate studies at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay from 2017–2021 in Metallurgical Engineering and Materials Science. However, I was lured into pursuing astronomy after some fun projects with Prof. Varun Bhalerao. I continued this pursuit as a graduate student at Texas Tech University, joining the group of Prof. Thomas Kupfer. After two fruitful years of studying hot subdwarf binaries for my master thesis, I moved to my current position in Belgium to work on much more massive binaries.

During my time at IIT Bombay, I co-led the institute astronomy club Krittika and organized the first edition of Krittika Summer Projects (KSP) – 2-month introductory astronomy projects meant for undergraduates (but open for all). KSP has only grown over the years thanks to the Krittika community; do check out the website to know more!