Group

Current group at Caltech

Avni Bansal (undergrad, working on variable stars in clusters)
Joe Smith (undergrad, working on X-ray binaries)
Leo Betancourt-Chitnis (2nd year grad, working on hypervelocity stars)
Cheyanne Shariat (3rd year grad, working on triple evolution)
Soumyadeep Bhattacharjee (4th year grad, working on post-interaction binaries and WD debris disks)
Lisa Blomberg (4th year grad, working on helium star binaries)
Natsuko Yamaguchi (5th year grad, working on white dwarf binaries)
Pranav Nagarajan (5th year grad, working on stellar-mass black holes and neutron stars)
Maude Gull (Caltech/Carnegie Brinson Fellow, working on metal-poor massive stars)
Geoffrey Mo (Caltech/Carnegie Brinson Fellow, working on binaries in clusters, SNe Ia, and instrumentation)

Former group members

Antonio Rodriguez (PhD 2025 -> Harvard Postdoc --> Waymo, working on accreting white dwarfs, co-advised with Shri Kulkarni)
Domani Sharkey (SURF 2024 --> UIUC grad school, worked on eROSITA and X-ray binaries)
Evan Portnoi (SURF 2023 --> Aerospace Corporation, worked on dC stars)

Frequent collaborators worldwide

Casey Lam (postdoc at Carnegie, working on non-accreting black holes)
Rhys Seeburger (grad student at MPIA/Heidelberg, working on binaries, spectral disentangling)
Johanna Müller-Horn (grad student at MPIA/Heidelberg, working on binaries, clusters, BHs)
Ben Pennell (grad student at MPIA/Heidelberg, working on binaries, planets, population modeling)
Kevin Burdge (faculty at MIT, working on ultracompact binaries)



Here is some general advice and expectations for students interested in joining the group.