Gaurav Waratkar | California Institute of Technology

About me

I am a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Caltech’s Cahill Center for Astronomy & Astrophysics. My interests include building space hardware and instrumentation, and studying rapidly fading relativistic transients.

At the Space Radiation Lab, I am developing next-generation X-ray detectors for future space missions. At Caltech Optical Observatories, I am building the next-generation infrared telescope Cryoscope, to be deployed at Antarctica. I also develop sensitive pipelines for rapid identification of transients like gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) in data from NuSTAR (SINGS) and AstroSat-CZTI (CIFT).

I am also a Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) affiliate for the 2026 cohort, engaging in interdisciplinary space science and technology.

I am originally from Nagpur, also known as the Orange City, in the central part of India. I spent a decade in Mumbai during my studies at IIT Bombay, before moving to California in 2025.

Research

Hardware: Space instrumentation, detector development, and mission design
Science: Fast-transients like gamma-ray bursts, tidal-disruption events, and gravitational wave counterparts
Techniques: Rapid temporal and spectral searches for faint high-energy transients

If you are in the space industry/startups or academia (in U.S. or otherwise) - or if you are looking for collaborations in these areas, feel free to reach out (e-mail)!

Previous experience

Previously, I did my B.Tech. (Mechanical Engineering) and Ph.D. (Astrophysics) at IIT Bombay.

My Ph.D. was supervised by Varun Bhalerao at STAR Lab. During my Ph.D., I led the structural and thermal design of the proposed Daksha satellite mission, studied high-energy transients with AstroSat-CZTI, and worked on low-latency gravitational-wave alerts with the LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA collaboration. Earlier, as a B.Tech. student in Mechanical Engineering, I worked on astronomy projects across the electromagnetic spectrum (X-ray, optical, and radio), was part of the IIT Bombay Racing team, building the gearbox & cooling of an electric race car, and was a part of Krittika.

Insight-IITB covered my decade-long journey at IIT Bombay here: link.

Publications

My complete publication list is available on NASA ADS (link). This list includes both refereed and non-refereed publications. You can follow this link for the refereed publications.

CV

Download my CV (PDF) - Updated Dec 2025.