Akshara Viswanathan

Akshara Viswanathan is a CITA National Fellow and IAU Gruber Foundation Fellow at the University of Victoria, exploring the ancient history of the Milky Way through its most metal-poor stars and faint stellar streams. Her work dives deep into the Galaxy’s outer halo, piecing together dynamics and chemistry to understand how the Milky Way—and galaxies like it—came to be.

Born and raised in Chennai, a beautiful coastal city in the south of India, Akshara’s path began in engineering before she switched orbits into astrophysics, with research stints across India, Canada, the UK, the US, and the Netherlands. Her love for astronomy began at age ten with a physics lesson on gravity, but the journey here involved quite the drama, switching from engineering to observational astrophysics (including her first research in astronomy as a MITACS summer student here in UVic, back in 2018). She recently completed her PhD at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute. Her current work uses data from Gaia, Pristine, GHOULS, and UNIONS surveys along with WEAVE, and Euclid surveys, in the future, blending observations with cosmological simulations to trace the Universe’s earliest stars and streams.

When not decoding galactic fossils, Akshara climbs rocks, sings Carnatic music, hikes mountains, pole dances and loves cooking dangerously spicy food for her friends. She’s also a committed advocate for open access based scientific tools and datasets, equity in science, mentoring students from underrepresented backgrounds and building inclusive research spaces.

Akshara's personal website can be found here.

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