Prasanta Bera received his BSc in Physics from Ramakrishna Mission Residential College (RKMRC), University of Calcutta, in 2010; his MSc in Physics from the India Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur in 2012; and his PhD from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2018. In his doctoral studies, focusing on strongly magnetized degenerate stars, he used the self-consistent field method to find the maximum equilibrium mass of magnetized white dwarfs and studied their instability properties. He also studied the temporal properties of the light curve of an accreting white dwarf in a binary stellar system due to the dynamical evolution of the radiating accretion column on the stellar surface.

 

For a brief period in 2018 at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics – Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (NCRA-TIFR), he studied the required differential rotation velocity in a low-mass galaxy to maintain the observationally inferred ordered magnetic field over a large length-scale against the supernova-driven turbulent dissipation. In 2019 he moved to the University of Southampton, UK, and started working on the effects of crustal elasticity on magnetic instabilities in neutron stars.

 

From autumn 2021, Prasanta will be working on magnetic field evolution in magnetars (extremely highly magnetized neutron stars) and the corresponding observable characteristics as a Foreign Postdoctoral Fellow in the research group of Prof. Jonathan Granot at the Open University of Israel.