National Science Foundation Alan T. Waterman Award

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Dr. Shrinivas Kulkarni is receiving the Alan T. Waterman award for his work on pulsars, the interstellar medium and astronomical instrumentation. He was co-discoverer of the first known millisecond pulsar. His research group has carried out surveys to discover pulsars in globular clusters and is responsible for about 1/3 of the known examples. He has also investigated many individual pulsars. This work has included the detection of x- ray emission from a millisecond pulsar and the discovery of one of the oldest known examples of a pulsar associated with a supernova remnant. He showed that a peculiar radio source was a supernova remnant with a pulsar embedded in its rim. This implies that supernova explosion was highly asymmetric and ejected the resulting neutron star at high velocity. His studies of the interstellar medium have demonstrated the existence of a magneto-ionic disk in the galaxy which extends out to 25 kpc while providing the first high-resolution images in the 3-mm line of CO for another galaxy, M 51. In the area of instrumentation he developed a pulsar timing instrument with a wide band width and fast signal processor. This device permits the detection of fainter and shorter period pulsars than had been possible previously. He has developed an optical interferometer which can produce diffraction limited images of stars. Observations of the long period variable star Mira with the 200 inch telescope at Mt. Palomar Observatory showed that the star is not round and is, thus, likely to be undergoing non-radial oscillations. He is currently carrying out studies of optical interferometry aimed at combining those techniques with developments in adaptive optics.