In May 2026, Aditya co-organized the workshop “Advancing Pulsar Science in the Era of Modern Interferometers” together with Nataliya Porayko (MPIfR, Germany), Pikky Atri, (ASTRON), Tim Sprenger (MPIfR, Germany), and Hao Ding (National Astronomical Observatories of China). This workshop was also one of the winners of the 2025 WE Heraeus-Lorentz call for workshops.
Aditya, can you tell us about your field of research?
I work in a field called radio astronomy, which uses radio telescopes to look at and answer questions about the universe. My specific field within radio astronomy is pulsar timing arrays and gravitational wave background research.
Pulsars are rotating neutron stars, some of the densest objects in the universe, resulting from a supernova explosion of a massive star. When they rotate, they send out radio waves with a specific timing that we can detect with high precision here on earth. But when gravitational waves are released in space, for example because supermassive black holes merge or collide with each other, they modify the pulsar timing. By accurately measuring any disturbance of the pulsar timing, we can get a map of the gravitational wave sky. And this is useful, in turn, because we can test theories such as Einstein’s theory of relativity under extreme conditions, or explore new physics. This entire research field has been going on for the last 15 years, where we have collected data, we have discovered new concepts, and we have discovered new pulsars. And we have used all of this to discover the gravitational wave background. The field is now transitioning from a period of discovery and measuring to understanding and mapping the gravitational wave sky.
When did you think: this topic is what I want to spend my scientific career on?
I did my bachelor's in engineering, not in astronomy. But actually, radio astronomy and engineering are extremely overlapping. A lot of digital signal processing and techniques you learn in engineering apply to radio astronomy too: from building radio telescopes to processing the radio astronomy data sets that come out. The first few people I met in radio astronomy happened to be pulsar astronomy experts. I started getting into pulsar astronomy and I really, really enjoyed it. I like the fact that pulsar are small little, extremely condensed neutron stars rotating as fast as kitchen blenders, and you can use them to study other aspects of the universe. I met people who were really passionate about this field of research, and I guess that bug stuck with me. And this led me to do my PhD in Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, one of the world leading institutes for radio and pulsar astronomy, which is where I built my foundational research experience in this field.
How does your typical research day look like?
It's a lot of meetings. But they are fun meetings, because now I'm a leader of a research group here at ASTRON, which means I’m working on projects together with PhD students and PostDocs, and it’s been a real pleasure working with all these people. A typical research day generally involves a lot of problem solving. But one of those days, once in a few weeks, you end up having a really good day where you've made progress in fixing a bug and that results in these new results that were not previously possible. We are all in search of those few weeks or few days in a month where we actually make progress.
Talking about a different (and yet very collaborative) type of meeting: how did you get the idea of organizing a workshop at the Lorentz Center?
I mean, the Lorentz Center is pretty famous, right? A lot of people in my collaborations have organized Lorentz Center meetings. In fact, one of the first Pulsar timing area meetings was a Lorentz Center workshop, which was instrumental to the field. And this was even before I started doing my PhD or I knew what a pulsar was. When I came to the Netherlands, I saw almost all my colleagues have a Lorentz Center poster on their doors. And that's how I learned that there was an opportunity to talk to the Lorentz Center about organizing my own workshop. Our field was going through a very transformative period, from discovery to characterization of the background. That transition period obviously came up with its own set of problems, which was only solvable by bringing together different communities. We really wanted to get these people together and see if we could actually find some solutions which were previously not possible because of lack of discussion. This is how the idea of the workshop came about.
And did this work out? Did it have the impact you expected in your scientific community?
Many impactful things have come out of the workshop. One is the interaction between the VLBI (very long baseline interferometry community), which uses multiple telescopes to image sources, and the pulsar timing community. Bringing together experts who knew one aspect but didn't really know the other was really useful because now we've already had several ideas for collaboration between teams that wouldn't have been possible before if not for these people meeting and actually discussing together.
Additionally, there were a few problems which we had published as problems in papers before, and that came up during discussion sessions. And then because they were a combination of statisticians who knew much more about statistics than the authors of the paper, and the authors of the paper were already there, we ended up working together in breakout sessions and actually coming up with solutions to these open problems.
I think the workshop has been extremely impactful in terms of the immediate scientific impact, and I believe its impact will be even stronger once we publish all the meeting notes in a review.
This workshop was selected as part of the WE Heraeus Lorentz call for workshops, and received additional funding from travel and hotels from the WE Heraeus foundation. How did that impact your workshop?
The WE Heraeus funding was an immense help because a lot of people, even though they could book travel, they couldn't really afford accommodation, especially students and some postdocs who we really wanted to be there.
Next to helping earlier career researchers, this support enabled the participation of the founding experts of certain aspects of the field who are very difficult to get to travel to workshops generally. Many of the more senior participants had not joined a conference or workshop in years, so it was very special to have them join our workshop. Their participation was really helpful because they knew the answers to many questions that were asked during the talks and their perspective enriched the discussions of the open questions. It also created a great opportunity for the early career researchers to meet with them during lunch, drinks, and dinner.
Would you organize another Lorentz Centre workshop?
100%. I would certainly organize another Lorentz workshop, I think the Lorentz Center is an extremely unique system. The interactive aspects of these workshops are what drives their soul. I can see that my field is going to get to a certain stage in the next three years, right? And you know, sometime in 2029, I think it will be a perfect time to organize another workshop, and I can see that I would probably do it at the Lorentz Center.
A picture of the workshop organizers (left to right), Pikky Atri, Nataliya Porayko, Hao Ding, Tim Sprenger, and Aditya Parthasarathy. Taken from the workshop website: Advancing Pulsar Science in the Era of Modern Interferometers
Interview written and edited by Federica Burla
