Dipen Bhattacharya

Dipen (Debadarshi) Bhattacharya grew up and received his early education in Dhaka, Bangladesh, attending St. Gregory’s High School and Notre Dame College. He now lives in California, USA. He studied physics at Moscow State University in the former Soviet Union and received his PhD in astrophysics from the University of New Hampshire, USA, in 1990. He conducted research at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and later worked as a gamma-ray astronomer at the University of California, Riverside, while also teaching physics at Moreno Valley College. His research involved observations of the universe using balloon-borne gamma-ray telescopes flown above the atmosphere from different parts of the world. In 2006–07, he taught at BRAC University in Dhaka as a Fulbright Fellow. Dipen is also a Bengali fiction writer, with several collections of short stories and six science-fiction novels published in Bangladesh and India. His writing often brings a scientific perspective together with deeply human concerns. He has also written books on the geological history of the Bengal Delta and observational astronomy, and has long been involved in science education and environmental initiatives related to Bangladesh and the USA.