Hamsa Padmanabhan

Hamsa Padmanabhan joined the Departement de Physique Theorique, Universite de Geneve as Collaboratrice Scientifique II and principal investigator of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Ambizione Grant in September 2020. She was previously a CITA Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics and a Tomalla post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Particle Physics and Astrophysics, ETH Zurich, Switzerland. She graduated from IUCAA, Pune, India with a Ph.D. in Physics in December 2015.

She has a wide breadth of research expertise, ranging from theoretical investigations (in quantum field theory and relativity) to data-intensive, observation-oriented astronomy and astrophysics. The novel halo model framework developed by her is used extensively in the community to interpret observations of atomic and molecular gas and to exploit the tremendous potential of future astrophysical surveys in the radio, millimetre and optical wavelengths. These studies, in which she plays an active role --- with collaborators from India, Europe, Canada and the USA --- probe both fundamental physics and cosmology.

She served as co-lead for the chapter on Cosmic Dawn and Reionization for the White paper on Fundamental Physics with the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), one of the biggest astrophysics projects of the coming decades, and is a member of the Swiss SKA Communications and Outreach Network (SKACON).