Hello -- I am Paramita Barai -- astrophysicist/astronomer, scientist and educator ... Since 2022-October, I'm working as a Staff Ricercatore at the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) - Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste (OATs) in Italy; and a member of the Trieste Numerical Cosmology Group.
The areas of my research include cosmology, the formation and evolution of larger-scale-structures, galaxies and galaxy clusters. A big fraction of my work is on supermassive black holes and AGN: gas accretion onto them, and resulting feedback on galaxies and their environments: the intergalactic medium and the intracluster medium. I perform theoretical research to investigate these using computational methods, mainly numerical simulations.
During 2020-2022, I was a Professor at the Centro de Ciências Naturais e Humanas (CCNH) of Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC), in Santo André, Brazil. I taught Physics courses at UFBC: Fenômenos Mecânicos in 2021.1 and 2022.1, Fenômenos Térmicos in 2020 and 2021.2, Laboratório de Física I in 2021.3.
I held a Jovem Pesquisador / Young Investigator grant (FAPESP grant number 2016/01355-5) from the São Paulo Research Foundation during 2017-2020. I was affiliated at the Núcleo de Astrofísica (NAT) of Universidade Cruzeiro do Sul (UniCSul) in 2020, and the Instituto de Astronomia, Geofísica e Ciências Atmosféricas (IAG) of Universidade de São Paulo (USP) over 2017-2019 (FAPESP grant number 2016/22183-8).
Before this, I worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at SNS: Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (Italy). I collaborated with Dr. Simona Gallerani on the topic "Windy black holes combing galaxy evolution".
Earlier, I was a Postdoctoral Associate at INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste (Italy). There I worked with Dr. Giuseppe Murante on the topic "The Universe in a Box: Multi-scale Simulations of Cosmic Structures". I also held a "CosmoIGM Fellowship" collaborating with Dr. Matteo Viel for the project cosmoIGM - The Intergalactic Medium as a Cosmological Tool.
Previously, I was a Post-Doc at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (USA), in the Department of Physics & Astronomy, working with Prof. Daniel Proga and Prof. Kentaro Nagamine.
Before that, I was a Post-Doc in the group of Prof. Hugo Martel, the Canada Research Chair in Theoretical and Numerical Cosmology, a part of the Astronomy group of the Département de Physique, de génie physique et d'optique, at Université Laval (Québec City, Canada).
I finished my graduate studies (Ph.D. and M.S. degrees) in Astrophysics from the Department of Physics and Astronomy, at Georgia State University (Atlanta, USA). For my PhD dissertation I worked under the guidance of my mentor Prof. Paul Wiita on cosmological evolution of Radio Galaxies. You can download my PhD thesis by clicking here.
I obtained my undergraduate degree in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology - Kharagpur (India).