
DEX BHADRA
About me
Hello! I'm a first-year PhD student in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto.
I graduated with honors in astrophysics from UC Berkeley in 2025. As an undergraduate researcher at UC Berkeley, I worked on black hole microlensing and contributed by adding binary models with orbital motion to a microlensing package called the Bayesian Analysis of Gravitational Lensing Events (BAGLE). After graduation, I worked as a Post-Baccalaureate researcher at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where I developed an automated high-resolution imaging analysis pipeline for microlensing targets in the Nancy Grace Roman Galactic Exoplanet Survey (RGES).
I'm very interested in research opportunities at the intersection of stellar physics, extragalactic astronomy, and data science.
I grew up in Mumbai, India. Anyone who knows me knows I've wanted to change my name since elementary school. I've never liked my legal name, and for many reasons, I have negative associations with it.
In the summer before my junior year at college, I read Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers. The story deeply resonated with me, and the book's protagonist, Dex, became someone I saw a lot of myself in. And so, I changed my name.