This is the web page of Priya Natarajan, Associate Professor in the Departments of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University. I am a theoretical astrophysicist interested in cosmology, gravitational lensing and black hole physics. I am currently the Director of Graduate Studies in the Astronomy Department. I was a Whitney Humanities fellow at Yale (2006 - 2007), am currently a fellow of Saybrook College and will be a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study this Fall. I am an Associate of the Dark Cosmology Centre, Niels Bohr Institute, at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

I have undergraduate degrees in Physics and Mathematics from M.I.T. I am also interested in the history and philosophy of science. I was enrolled in the MIT Program in Science, Technology & Society from 1991 to 1993. I did my graduate work at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge in England, where I was a member of Trinity College and elected to a Title A Research Fellowship that I held from 1997 to 2003. Prior to coming to Yale, I was a visiting postdoctoral fellow for a few months at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto, Canada.

selected recent publications

The survival of dark matter halos in the cluster Cl0024+16, Priyamvada Natarajan et al., ApJ, submitted, 2007
Consequences of dark matter self-annihilation for galaxy formation, Priyamvada Natarajan, Darren Croton and Gianfranco Bertone, MNRAS, in press, 2008
The evolution of massive black hole seeds, Marta Volonteri, Giuseppe Lodato and Priyamvada Natarajan, MNRAS, 383, 1079, 2008
Probing the truncation of galaxy dark matter halos in high density environments from hydrodynamical N-body simulations, Marceau Limousin, Jesper Sommer-Larsen, Priyamvada Natarajan and Bo Milvang-Jensen, ApJ, submitted, 2007
How robust are the constraints on cosmology and galaxy evolution from the lens-redshift test?, Pedro Capelo and Priyamvada Natarajan, focus issue on gravitational lensing, NJP, 9, 445, 2008
Strong lensing statistics in large, z~< 0.2 surveys: bias in the lens galaxy population, Ole Moeller, Manfred Kitzbilcher and Priyamvada Natarajan, MNRAS, 379, 1195, 2007
The observed concentration-mass relation for galaxy clusters, Julie Comerford and Priyamvada Natarajan, MNRAS, 379, 190, 2007
Substructure in lensing clusters and simulations, Priyamvada Natarajan, Gabriella De Lucia and Volker Springel, MNRAS, 376, 180, 2007
The mass function of high redshift seed black holes, Giuseppe Lodato and Priyamvada Natarajan, MNRAS, 377, L64, 2007