Pradip Gatkine, a UCLA assistant professor of physics and astronomy, and Kevin Bundy, a UC Santa Cruz associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics, received an inaugural $3.7 million, four-year Kavli Exploration Award.
Funded by the Kavli Foundation in partnership with philanthropist Kevin Wells, the award will be led out of UCLA and will allow principal investigator Gatkine and co-principal investigator Bundy to develop a novel astrophotonics instrument suite at Lick Observatory in San Jose to study how planets form around nearby stars.
Read the full Kavli Exploration Award release here.
In addition to advancing this particular research, Gatkine and Bundy’s work showcases the remarkable potential of the burgeoning field of astrophotonics to improve current telescopes and create more powerful ones in the future.
