Payaswini Saikia is a postdoctoral associate at New York University Abu Dhabi, working on black hole accretion and relativistic jet physics. After completing her undergraduate degree of Physics Hons. in St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, she obtained the prestigious Erasmus Mundus Scholarship to attend an European Master’s course in Astrophysics as a part of the programme Astromundus. Her Master’s research, titled ‘The UV and Optical Spectral Properties of a Sample of Broad Line AGNs’ was awarded the ‘Best Master’s Thesis’ by the Astromundus consortium. To pursue her research career, she joined as a PhD student at the Radboud University Nijmegen, and studied the accretion and ejection processes in supermassive black holes, with Dr. Elmar Koerding and Prof. Dr. Heino Falcke. During her PhD, she was awarded the 'Frye stipend’ by Radboud University for excellence in research. Currently, she is a Postdoctoral Associate in New York University Abu Dhabi in the Department of Physics, and is using multi-wavelength data to understand the nature of powerful jets launched by stellar-mass black holes within the Milky Way. She is also passionate about science communication with the general public, and has considerable experience of public outreach activities in astronomy and astrophysics.

Most research interests for a scientist

Her research interests include black holes, accretion and relativistic jet physics, active galatic nuclei, X-ray binaries, and radio astronomy.