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Somak Raychaudhury is Vice-Chancellor, Ashoka University. He was previously the Director of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune.

Professor Raychaudhury graduated from Presidency College, University of Calcutta, and went on to read Physics at Trinity College, University of Oxford, supported by an Inlaks Shivdasani scholarship. He did his Ph.D. in Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, supported by the Isaac Newton Studentship, where he was awarded a J T Knight prize. He then moved to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, (CfA) at Cambridge, USA, as a Smithsonian Fellow. He stayed on to work in the High Energy Astrophysics division of the CfA, working for a NASA project, as part of the team that built the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, now in orbit. At this time, he was always a Fellow of Lowell House, Harvard University.