Shantanu Basu

Shantanu Basu is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Western University, in London, Ontario, Canada. Shantanu's personal and professional life has taken him across the world several times, with Canada representing his fifth country of residence. He received his PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1993, and held academic positions at Michigan State University and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, in Toronto, before joining Western in 1999.

Shantanu is known as an expert in studies of the early stages of star formation and protoplanetary disk formation and evolution. He has made contributions to understanding fragmentation of interstellar molecular clouds, the role of magnetic fields and angular momentum in gravitational collapse and star formation, the origin of luminosity bursts from young stellar objects, and the origin of power-laws in the mass distribution of stars. Shantanu has also contributed to understanding the luminosity function of supermassive black holes seen in the high redshift universe. He is one of the originators of the Migrating Embryo Model for protoplanetary disk evolution, which is a unified scenario for angular momentum transport, binary star and giant planet formation, and the formation of ejected freely floating low mass objects. Shantanu has published over 100 research papers, mostly as first or second author, and has given over 100 invited lectures and colloquia, spanning 16 different countries.

Shantanu served as Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Western from 2010-2015. He was previously the Site Leader for the Sharcnet supercomputing consortium at Western, and Director of the Collaborative Program in Theoretical Physics. In 2007 he was named a Faculty Scholar by Western, in recognition of outstanding research and teaching. In 2013, Asteroid 277883 Basu was named after him by the International Astronomical Union.