WIA-Europe is proud to announce the first of six grant winner of 2019.

Shambo Bhattacharjee is a final year PhD research student at the University of Leeds, UK. The theme of his research is space debris and the objective is to develop improved methods to track space debris based on directional statistics. He is in the department of Statistics and his supervisor is Prof. John T. Kent.

The project is funded by the U.S.A Air Force Office of Scientific Research. They have published several research papers. Last year, Shambo was invited to present his research work at the British parliament.

Before joining the University of Leeds, he worked as a project associate at the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), India. At the PRL, his work was based on analysing crater formation under microgravity conditions. Shambo did his masters from the International Space University and was selected to do the internship at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) under the supervision of Dr. Marc Kuchner. At the GSFC, Shambo worked on a citizen science project named “Disk Detective” and his key contributions were correcting inaccurate WISE magnitudes for disk detective objects (around 273,000 objects), modelling SED plots and classifying debris disks and other objects discovered with the WISE.

His team also won the “Robert H. Goddard Honor Award for Exceptional Achievement in Outreach”.

Last year, Shambo won the Emerging space leaders grant (by the IAF). Some of his other interests are interstellar travel, autonomous driving (recently co-authored a chapter of a book, published by the Springer Nature), machine learning, algorithm design and computer programming.