Overview
- The society recognized his “sustained, innovative and ground‑breaking contributions to multi‑wavelength transient astrophysics,” noting that his facilities revolutionized optical time‑domain astronomy.
- Kulkarni led the Palomar Transient Factory and the Zwicky Transient Facility, which have detected thousands of brief cosmic events, with ZTF still surveying the Northern sky every two nights.
- He discovered the first millisecond pulsar and later helped establish that the most powerful gamma‑ray bursts occur beyond the Milky Way.
- He said he was surprised by the honor and publicly thanked long‑term collaborators along with the engineering teams behind PTF and ZTF.
- He is contributing to NASA’s UVEX ultraviolet sky survey targeted for 2030 and leads the Z‑Shooter spectrometer project for the Keck Observatory with first light expected in 2029.