Dr. Raja GuhaThakurta  is a Distinguished Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California Santa Cruz. He studies the formation and evolution of galaxies large and small, with a focus on the assembly of their dark matter, dynamics of their resolved stellar population, merger history, chemical enrichment, and star formation history. He makes extensive use of the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope, and Keck telescopes in his research. At the present time, he has over 800 publications (scientific journal articles, conference papers/abstracts, astronomical bulletins, etc). He is the founder and faculty director of the successful Science Internship Program (SIP), in which high school students are mentored by UCSC researchers and work on cutting-edge STEAM research projects. He also founded two other educational initiatives: (1) StS (Shadow the Scientists), which allows students and educators to eavesdrop via Zoom on scientists while they conduct research, and (2) PyaR (Python and Research), an online computer programming tutorial set in the context of astronomy research. These programs are under the CrEST (Creating Equity in STEAM) umbrella that he started at UCSC. GuhaThakurta has been appointed a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China from 2022–2025, American Astronomical Society Fellow in 2021, Outstanding Faculty in UCSC’s Physical and Biological Sciences Division in 2020–2021, Raymond and Beverly Sackler Distinguished Lecturer at Tel-Aviv University in 2018, and visiting faculty at Google in 2015. He was awarded the National Research Council of Canada’s Herzberg Memorial Prize and Fellowship in 2001, and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 1997. He received his Ph.D. in Astrophysical Sciences from Princeton University in 1989 and his B.Sc. in Physics from St. Xavier’s College in Kolkata, India in 1983.