Dipankar Banerjee is an Indian solar physicist. He is a senior Professor of Solar Physics at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (Bangalore) and currently serves as the director of the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (AIRES).He has recently been appointed as director of IIST(Indian Institute of Space Science & Technology).

Education and early career

In 1987, Banerjee who was a student of Ballygunge Government High School completed a Bachelor's Degree at St. Xaviers College, Calcutta in Physics (major), Chemistry and Mathematics. In 1996 he completed his PhD "Magnetohydrodynamic phenomena in the solar atmosphere" at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (Bangalore) with Prof. S.S. Hasan. Via a PPARC fellowship, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Armagh Observatory between 1997 and 2000 on solar atmospheric dynamics using the

SOHO spacecraft The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is a European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft built by a European industrial consortium led by Matra Marconi Space (now Airbus Defence and Space) that was launched on a Lockheed Martin Atlas IIAS lau ...

. This was followed by a Fund for Scientific Research (Flanders) fellowship at the Katholic University of Leuven between 2000 and 2002. In 2004, he returned to the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (Bangalore) and was appointed as a Director of ARIES in 2019. His wife, Tisha Banerjee, is a PhD in Cell and molecular biology. He has a daughter named Teerna Banerjee who is a PhD candidate in cell and molecular biology at University College Dublin. As well as a son named Arno Banerjee who studies Environmental Chemistry in University College Dublin.

Research interests

Banerjee's primary research interest is the dynamics of the solar atmosphere. In particular, he has focussed on the propagation of wavs through the solar

chromosphere A chromosphere ("sphere of color") is the second layer of a star's atmosphere, located above the photosphere and below the solar transition region and corona. The term usually refers to the Sun's chromosphere, but not exclusively. In the Su ...

and corona, including innovations in the technique of atmospheric magnetoseismology. He has also studied space weather and the solar dynamo through long-term observations such as those provided by the 100-year synoptic data from

Kodaikanal Observatory The Kodaikanal Solar Observatory is a solar observatory owned and operated by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics. It is on the southern tip of the Palani Hills from Kodaikanal town. The Evershed effect was first detected at this observatory ...

Awards and honours

* 1997: PPARC postdoctoral fellowship * 2002: Fund for Scientific Research (Flanders) fellowship * 2013: Visiting professor (Capita Selecta Lecturer) at Centre for Plasma Astrophysics, K.U. Leuven * 2015: Associate Editor for Solar Physics * 2016: Co-I of Polarimeter on the PUNCH spacecraft * 2017: PI of the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory data archive * 2017: Co-I for near-UV imaging instrument (SUIT) on the Aditya-L1 mission * 2017: Co-chair of the science working group for the Aditya-1 mission * 2020: Editor for Frontiers Stellar and Solar Physics

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Banerjee, Dipankar 21st-century Indian physicists Living people St. Xavier's College, Kolkata alumni Indian Institute of Astrophysics Year of birth missing (living people) Scientists from West Bengal