Professor to build partnership in India

Physics Professor Shashi Kanbur works with his advisee Danielle Citro ’13 on an astrophysics project she will present at a national conference.

SUNY OSWEGO PHYSICS PROFESSOR SHASHI KANBUR travels to India this spring to open a new collaboration in Delhi for course development in astrophysics and research in realms including the evolution of stars.

A travel award from the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum and the American Physical Society will fund his trip to the University of Delhi.

Among Kanbur’s objectives are to develop and teach a two-week course, with an emphasis on statistical methods, to graduate and undergraduate students on topics related to stellar evolution, the extra-galactic distance scale and cosmology. With the assistance of professor Harinder Singh of the University of Delhi, he plans to work with researchers to construct software for the automated classification of variable stars. Also he aims to draft a grant proposal for the U.S. National Science Foundation to bring American undergraduates to India for summer research and to develop a joint online course in astrophysics between SUNY Oswego and the University of Delhi.

A long-term goal is to establish Delhi as a research partnership in SUNY Oswego’s Global Laboratory program, Kanbur said. The Global Laboratory offers students hands-on, immersive problem-solving opportunities in international laboratories in promising fields of study such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

There are two Global Laboratory sites in India, at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and the University of Calcutta, as well as in Brazil, Congo, Costa Rica, Republic of Korea, Taiwan and more. For more information on Oswego’s Global Laboratory program, visit oswego.edu/globallaboratory.