Mentorship

I was a Teaching Assistant for the course PH 556: Astrophysics, by Prof Varun Bhalerao at IIT Bombay. As part of a team of 4, I guided a batch of 30+ students in the selection of course project topics, thus helping them gain experience of submitting observation proposals for 0.70-m GROWTH India Telescope. I guided all the project teams in scheduling observations, acquiring data and taught students basic data analysis using astronomy tools like DS9 and APT.

The Maths and Physics Club of IIT Bombay, in association with Career Cell, designed and conducted a course on Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modelling under Learners' Space. We developed tutorials and assignments on creating mathematical and computational models to aid in understanding and solving scientific problems. Through the assignments and weekly hands-on sessions, the registered students learnt how to mathematically model real-life scenarios like heat transfer, the predator-prey model, planetary motion, Leontief models and very interestingly - epidemiology. They also learnt how to solve such models and analyse them in Python. This involved learning to generate computational models to aid in solving scientific problems. We designed course material for learning how to solve matrix and differential equations computationally, including numerical methods such as Euler’s method, finite difference method and Runge-Kutta algorithm.

The Maths and Physics Club of IIT Bombay hosts student reading projects called "Summer of Science" every year. I mentored many students in the Summer of Science 2020 and 2021 editions, guiding them for a 3-month long reading project, by sharing resources and research material on General and Observational Astronomy and fostering active discussions within the group. The topics covered included space exploration, missions of ISRO and NASA, ISS, Hubble telescope, paradoxes in cosmology, galaxies, hydrostatic equilibrium of stars, stellar energy sources and supernova explosions.