User:Karan.P.Jani

Karan Jani (born May 18, 1988) is an Indian astrophysicist and physics graduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology, working on black holes, gravitational waves, and testing Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. He is part of the LIGO team which led to the first observation of gravitational waves from binary black hole merger. He also holds the Senator Sam Nunn fellowship in national security at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs.

He is a member of the Indian Initiative in Gravitational-wave Observations effort to build gravitational wave detector LIGO in India.

Biography
Karan was born in Mumbai, India and did his K-12 schooling in Baroda, Gujarat. He attended Maharaja Sayajirao University before joining Penn State from where he obtained his degrees in physics, astronomy, astrophysics along with a minor in mathematics. He is currently a graduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has previously held undergraduate research positions at the Institute of Gravitation and Cosmos at Penn State, Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics and Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

He was part of the delegation that met with the Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi in Washington DC for the historic signing of MoU between National Science Foundation and Department of Atomic Energy to build a LIGO detector in India. The LIGO-India project is ranked as the top science-technology priority in the India–United States relations.