CITA Fellow Akshara Viswanathan is one of the three winners of the 2025 Gruber Fellowship Award, shared with Deaglan John Bartlett, Sambatriniaina Hagiriche Aycha Rajohnson.
Each year,
The Gruber Foundation (TGF), in collaboration with the International Astronomical Union (IAU), funds a US$75 000 fellowship programme for promising young astronomers.
“The TGF Fellowship selection committee was deeply impressed by the exceptional quality and originality of this year’s applications. The current generation of early-career astronomers is distinguished by an extraordinary depth of insight and creativity, and the breadth of stimulating research proposals made the selection process both inspiring and exceedingly competitive. We warmly congratulate the 2025 TGF Fellowship recipients and wish all applicants continued success in their future academic and professional endeavours.” said IAU Vice-President and Chair of the TGF committee Hyesung Kang.
In reaction to the award, Dr. Viswanathan shared, “I’m honoured to receive the Gruber Fellowship and grateful to IAU and TGF for supporting early-career researchers in astrophysics. This award will help advance my work on low-metallicity stellar streams in the Milky Way’s outer halo and build collaborations to combine observational data with simulations in this next stage of research. I’m especially thankful to my PhD supervisor Else Starkenburg, the Pristine collaboration, and colleagues at Groningen, CCA, UVic and CITA. Fellowships like this play a vital role in building inclusive, collaborative science — and I feel fortunate to be part of that effort”.
Akshara Viswanathan started her CITA National Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Victoria, Canada in January 2025. Her research aims to study the low-mass, low-metallicity stellar streams in the Milky Way’s outer halo, which are remnants of ancient accretion events, to understand the early assembly of the galaxy. By combining observational data from surveys like Gaia and Euclid with cosmological simulations, she will explore the role of these stellar streams in galaxy formation, the nature of dark matter, and the early universe’s chemical enrichment processes. Dr. Viswanathan is an astronomer from India who completed her PhD at the University of Groningen in 2024.