Shreyas Vissapragada

George Ellery Hale Distinguished Scholar, Carnegie Science Observatories

Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship awarded in 2019 to pursue a PhD in Planetary Science at California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

Shreyas Vissapragada is an immigrant from India.

About Shreyas Vissapragada

Dr. Shreyas Vissapragada is the George Ellery Hale Distinguished Scholar at Carnegie Science Observatories in Pasadena, California. Most recently, he was the 51 Pegasi b Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University working at the Center for Astrophysics.

Shreyas was born in Hyderabad, India, and immigrated to the United States with his parents when he was one. He grew up in tightly woven communities of Indian immigrants, mostly Telugu-speaking, in the suburbs of Detroit and Chicago. The frameworks of collaboration defining these communities had a profound impact on Shreyas’s approach to problem-solving.

Shreyas studied astrophysics and computer science at Columbia University, where he pursued research on the chemical environments in which planets and their host stars are born. He then earned his PhD from Caltech in 2022 covering a broad range of exoplanetary science, from measuring the densities of super-Earths outside the Solar System to probing atmospheric escape from highly irradiated exoplanets. Shreyas hopes to one day investigate the natures and histories of these alien worlds further as both a researcher and teacher at the university level.