Debatri Chattopadhyay, Ph.D Assistant Professor - Department of Physics and Astronomy

Education

•  PhD in Astrophysics, Swinburne University of Technology / ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), Australia, 2021
• MSc in Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India, 2016
• BSc (Honours) in Physics, Scottish Church College, University of Calcutta, India, 2014

Web Links

• Personal website
• ORCID
• Google Scholar

Research Interests

Dr Chattopadhyay joined Texas Tech in 2026 after postdoctoral positions at Cardiff University and Northwestern University. She studies how neutron stars and black holes form, evolve and merge, and how these populations reveal themselves across gravitational waves, radio pulsars, Gaia astrometry and electromagnetic transients. Her group will build multi-messenger population models that carry one set of physical assumptions from stellar and binary evolution, as well as the dynamics of dense star clusters, into what detectors and surveys actually observe, and tests them against gravitational-wave, pulsar and Gaia data. Current projects include black-hole growth from stellar to intermediate to massive masses in globular and nuclear star clusters, the spin and mass evolution of neutron stars as radio pulsars, forecasts of kilonovae and short gamma-ray bursts for upcoming surveys, and machine-learning inference for gravitational-wave populations, with predictions for LISA and for next-generation detectors such as Cosmic Explorer and the Einstein Telescope. She is a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and an Associate Investigator of OzGrav. Students interested in computational astrophysics, gravitational waves or multi-messenger astronomy are welcome to get in touch.

OUT SIDE OF RESEARCH

Outside astrophysics, Dr. Chattopadhyay has trained in Manipuri (Indian classical) dance since the age of four, reads English and Bengali literature, travels around the globe for history and archaeology whenever she can, and collects books, sarees and Barbies. 

Selected Publications

• Chattopadhyay D. (2026), Neutron Star Mass across Binary Pulsar Subpopulations: Mass–Spin Correlation, Mass Distributions, and Moment of Inertia Effects, arXiv:2606.29146
• Chattopadhyay D., Marín Pina D., Gieles M., et al. (2026), Repopulating the pair-instability mass gap without sustained growth to massive IMBHs: the case of 47 Tuc, arXiv:2604.09773
• Chattopadhyay D., Rocha K. A., Gossage S., Kalogera V., et al. (2026), Modelling the Future of Gaia Neutron Star–Main-sequence Binaries: From Eccentric Orbits to Millisecond Pulsar–White Dwarfs, ApJ 1000, 190
•  LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA Collaboration, incl. Chattopadhyay D. (2026), GWTC-4.0: Population Properties of Merging Compact Binaries, ApJL 1005, L51 (core writing team; led the astrophysical-interpretation and neutron-star sections)
• Antonini F., Romero-Shaw I. M., Callister T., Dosopoulou F., Chattopadhyay D., et al. (2026), Gravitational-wave constraints on the pair-instability mass gap and nuclear burning in massive stars, Nature Astronomy ,10, 1049
• Chattopadhyay D., Al-Shammari S., Antonini F., et al. (2025), The impact of astrophysical priors on parameter inference for GW230529, MNRAS Letters 536, L19
• LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA Collaboration, incl. Chattopadhyay D. (2024), Observation of Gravitational Waves from the Coalescence of a 2.5–4.5 M⊙ Compact Object and a Neutron Star, ApJL 970, L34 (direct contributor; the paper acknowledges my earlier predictions of such systems)
• Chattopadhyay D., Stegmann J., Antonini F., et al. (2023), Double black hole mergers in nuclear star clusters: eccentricities, spins, masses, and the growth of massive seeds, MNRAS 526, 4908
• Chattopadhyay D., Hurley J., Stevenson S., Raidani A. (2022), Dynamical double black holes and their host cluster properties, MNRAS 513, 4527
• Chattopadhyay D., Stevenson S., Broekgaarden F., Antonini F., Belczynski K. (2022), Modelling the formation of the first two neutron star–black hole mergers, GW200105 and GW200115: metallicity, chirp masses, and merger remnant spins, MNRAS 513, 5780
• Chattopadhyay D., Stevenson S., Hurley J. R., Bailes M., Broekgaarden F. (2021), Modelling neutron star–black hole binaries: future pulsar surveys and gravitational wave detectors, MNRAS 504, 3682
• Chattopadhyay D., Stevenson S., Hurley J. R., Rossi L. J., Flynn C. (2020), Modelling double neutron stars: radio and gravitational waves, MNRAS 494, 1587