In Brief 8212; Pune

Born on January 21, 1944 in the erstwhile western Punjab, Kapahi moved with his family to North India during the partition days. He was educated in Meerut, Madras and Bangalore. Immediately after his graduation from St Joseph8217;s College in Bangalore in 1962, he joined the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre Training School. When Prof Govind Swarup returned to India to establish the Radio Astronomy group at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay, Kapahi joined him as a young research associate as a 19-year-old.

In his 36-year-old long career at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Prof Kapahi played a key role in the all round development of radio astronomy in the country, including the construction of the Kalyan Radio Telescope and the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope GMRT in Khodad near Narayangaon, which is the world8217;s largest telescope operating at frequencies upto 1.4GHz.

Since 1994, he had been the director of the NCRA. Kapahi is internationally acclaimed for his findings in the field of extragalactic radio sources and cosmology. He has authored nearly a 100 research papers. He had also won prestigious awards such as Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar Award of CSIR and Hari Om Ashram Prerit Vikram Sarabhai award.