Debnandini Mukherjee

"I grew up in a small coal mining town in the state of West Bengal in India, even though my parents were from a big city. My father was a mining engineer and mostly busy. There was little to do in that small town for a kid and we spent the warm summer evenings on the terrace in the hope of some cool air (a common practice in 90s India, before the era of ubiquitous air conditioning). While my parents talked about their day, I was mostly bored and spent hours staring at the starlit sky. Thats when I started bothering my parents with questions like 'Exactly how many stars are there? How far away are they? Why don't they all twinkle the same way?' My parents sometimes struggled to answer and hence sent me to bed. I found a children's encyclopedia at home which seemed to have a lot on basic astronomy, which I then started to read. I realized that reality is very different from how we see it every day. The idea that there is a lot more to our perceivable universe than what we see every day captivated me like some mystery novel. I was hooked. By third grade it was decided: I will be an astronaut. However, the later part of that encyclopedia had some illustrations on astronauts preparing for space travel. There was a picture of Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, practicing surviving in space in a spinning device. As a child, I was afraid of spinning rides at fairs, so I settled and revised my ambition to be an astrophysicist instead."

Debnandini Mukherjee is a post-doctoral scholar at Pennsylvania State University's Institute for Gravitation and Cosmos. She works on gravitational wave data analysis and focuses on the search for intermediate-mass black-hole binaries (IMBHs). In her free time, Debnandini watches films and shows (her favorite movie is an Indian Bengali Film called "Asha Jaoar Majhe [The Labour of Love]"), cooks, and writes when inspired enough. She also enjoys photographing buildings on the Penn State campus and recently discovered the Berkey Creamery, which has the best ice cream she has ever had. You can follow Debnandini on Facebook at debnandini.mukherjee.9.