Professor (Dr.) Somak Raychaudhury is the Vice-Chancellor of Ashoka University. He has undergraduate degrees from Presidency College, University of Calcutta and University of Oxford. After his PhD from the University of Cambridge, he worked at Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, where he also was part of the team that built the Chandra X-Ray Observatory for NASA. After teaching for over a decade at the University of Birmingham, UK, he returned to India as Dean of Sciences at Presidency University, Kolkata, and went on to become the Director of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune. Dr Raychaudhury is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. His research involves a wide range of topics in Cosmology and Astrophysics, from the ground and from Space.