Dr Vishal Gajjar

Vishal Gajjar is a researcher with the Breakthrough Listen team at the Berkeley SETI research centre. He received his PhD from the National Center for Radio Astrophysics in Pune in 2015. His PhD gave him expertise in understanding pulsar emission physics by studying various single-pulse phenomena. 

He was born in a small town in India’s Gujarat (Botad) and did his schooling there. He completed an Engineering degree from the Shantilal Shah Engineering College (Bhavnagar, Gujarat) in Electronics and Communication. At present, he is working with the Breakthrough Listen team as a project scientist for international collaborative facilities to enable SETI experiments across the globe using several radio telescopes. 

Vishal is also leading an observing campaign to survey the Galactic centre region with the Breakthrough Listen program across a large part of the radio spectrum using some of the most sensitive telescopes in the world to search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (ETI). Vishal is also interested in searching for transient dispersed signals. In August 2017, he led the discovery of the first and so far, the only detection of a Fast Radio Burst (FRB) at the highest radio frequencies. 

In his spare time, when he is not looking for ETIs and FRBs, he likes to go on hiking trips with his wife and kid. One of his personal goals is to visit all the national parks in the US over the next few years.