San Diego County, California, USA: Mansi Kasliwal has been appointed as the director of the Palomar Observatory by the California Institute of Technology, becoming the first woman to lead the historic facility.

Kasliwal is recognized as a prominent figure in time-domain and multi-messenger astrophysics, with her research focusing on “cosmic fireworks” — intense stellar explosions and transient events that shed light on the life cycles of stars and the creation of elements in the universe.

She has been instrumental in enhancing Palomar Observatory’s discovery capabilities, contributing significantly to projects such as the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), the infrared surveys Palomar Gattini-IR (PGIR) and WINTER, and the recently commissioned Next-Generation Palomar Spectrograph (NGPS).

Globally, Kasliwal serves as the principal investigator of the Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen (GROWTH), a project that allows continuous observation of rapidly changing cosmic events. This initiative has played a crucial role in following up on gravitational wave detections and monitoring their electromagnetic counterparts.

Her accolades include the 2022 Breakthrough Prize in Physics, over 440 published peer-reviewed papers, and an h-index of 100. She has also led major international efforts to study transient phenomena associated with gravitational waves.

Born in Indore, India, Kasliwal moved to the United States at 15. She attended a boarding school in Connecticut and completed her final year of high school through college courses. She earned her bachelor’s degree in applied and engineering physics from Cornell University in 2005.

Kasliwal then pursued graduate studies at Caltech, completing a master’s and a PhD in astrophysics by 2011. She held a joint postdoctoral fellowship at Carnegie Observatories and Princeton University from 2011 to 2015. Returning to Caltech in 2015 as an assistant professor of astronomy, she was promoted to full professor in 2021.