Theoretical astrophysicist Debarati Chatterjee has always seen gender for what it is — a social construct. Despite witnessing domestic violence as a child, experiencing sexual harassment as an undergraduate and a PhD student, and being one of the small proportion (around 20%) of astronomers in the world who are women, she hasn’t let her gender define her career.
Leaving her home country of India to start a postdoctoral position in Germany in 2010, she saw that prejudices based on race, class and gender also existed in the international scientific community. Chatterjee works in the emerging and male-dominated field of gravitational-wave science. She studies neutron stars — ultra-dense cores that are left over when massive stars collapse — by looking at gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of space-time. It’s an approach that brings together several disciplines, including nuclear, particle and condensed-matter physics.
On her return to India in 2020, she joined the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune. In June, the 45-year-old was promoted to full professor, becoming the first woman to be awarded this role in the institution’s 37-year history. Her research group generates complex theoretical models to crack the mystery of the interior composition of neutron stars.
She also wants more women to pursue science subjects, especially astrophysics, and has held various roles to promote gender equity. She was a core member of the IUCAA’s committee to combat sexual harassment and was part of the Astronomical Society of India’s Working Group for Gender Equity, for which she helped to run campaigns highlighting pioneering work by female Indian scientists. An avid science communicator, this year, Chatterjee launched the Indian branch of the Pint of Science festival — an annual festival that invites scientist to pubs and cafés to share their latest research — this year across three cities. Chatterjee has also popularized the science behind the planned Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory-India (LIGO-India), which is to be built in a rural area called Hingoli. By delivering talks at schools, universities and astronomy clubs across India, she helps to inspire girls and young women to become scientists.
Chatterjee spoke to Nature about how she overcame sexual harassment to become an astrophysicist, and why she promotes gender and racial diversity in her field.
What is the great passion that has driven you as a scientist?
Curiosity and adventure have always driven me. Since childhood, I have been obsessed with finding solutions, and I don’t rest until I get to the root of the issue. The fact that science can be about addressing extremely complex problems, which can take a lifetime to solve, excites me. Even for someone like Einstein, conundrums in fields such as quantum physics and general relativity were too difficult to solve in his lifetime. During my undergraduate studies at St Xavier’s College in Kolkata, my summer project at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) was about understanding how the Sun rotates, a question that remains unanswered. That was when I fell in love with how the academic world works.
When I went to the IIA, I realized I didn’t need to pursue a 9-to-5 routine. I saw that some researchers woke up at 10 a.m. and worked past midnight — then they would go off to play badminton until the early hours. I was very attracted to this way of life. Also, visiting observatories such as the Vainu Bappu Observatory in Tamil Nadu, which is in the middle of a forest, felt like an adventure that I was ready to have for the rest of my life.
Debarati Chatterjee (front row, second from right) with students at a Pint of Science outreach event.Credit: Kshitij Parshetti/Pint of Science India
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