Hi! My full name is Sindhu Sri Sravya Satyavolu. I’m a PhD student working with Prof. Girish Kulkarni in the Department of Theoretical Physics at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai. I previously studied engineering in the Department of Physics and Electrical Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras.

Research in Extragalactic Astrophysics and Cosmology

Quasars are the brightest astrophysical sources in the Universe, powered by supermassive black holes. Several quasars have been observed as far as ~13 billion years back in time, having central supermassive black holes billion times more massive than the Sun. These quasars also act as a backlight, allowing us to look through the intergalactic medium between us and the quasar. That being so, what can we learn about the intergalactic medium from quasars? How did the supermassive black holes of quasars grow so massive within only a billion years after Big Bang? I mainly use simulations and observations of quasar spectra at the end of the reionisation epoch to probe answers to the above questions. I’m also a member of the XQR-30 and JWST-EREBUS collaborations for observing and studying high-redshift quasars.