The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Department of Physics and Astronomy College of Sciences
Soumya D. Mohanty
Professor 
Ph.D., Inter-University Center for Astronomy & Astrophysics, Pune, India, 1997
(Degree awarded by Pune University, 1998)
Office: BLHSB 2.224 (Brownsville)
Phone: 956 882 6680
Email: soumya.mohanty@utrgv.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Teaching
Sp 2017: Physics for Scientists and Engineers (PHYS 2426), UT San Antonio Dissertation courses
Office hours: (See the course syllabus on blackboard.)
Research
Mohanty’s research has focused on solving some important data analysis challenges in Gravitational Wave (GW) astronomy across all observational frequency bands. The following are some of his notable contributions. (a) Coherent network analysis of data for burst GW signals [in these papers 1,2]. The relevance of this work to the first direct detection of GWs can be seen in this paper. (b) Population study method to detect an association between GWs and Gamma Ray Bursts (and other astrophysical triggers). This is now a standard way to analyze GW data. (c) Introduction of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) in GW data analysis, where it is being used more frequently now. For aficionados of Statistics and Big Data, these challenges straddle a wide-range of areas such as semi-parametric regression of weak signals in noisy data, high-dimensional non-linear parametric regression, time series classification, and analysis of data from large heterogeneous sensor arrays. Mohanty’s work on GW data analysis has been funded by grants from the Research Corporation, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and NASA. In the area of pedagogy, Mohanty developed an innovative course that uses the medium of video games to teach Physics. View an early version of the course on game-based-learning.