Somak Raychaudhury obtained his PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Cambridge in 1990, where he continued his research on superclusters of galaxies as a research fellow at the Institute of Astronomy and a fellow of St Edmund's College. In 1991, he moved to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) as a Smithsonian fellow, working on near-infrared Astronomy. In 1993, he became a staff member of the Chandra Science Center at the CfA, working on X-ray Astronomy. During this period, he taught in the Core programme at Harvard University, and was a tutor at Lowell House. In 1995, he spent a year at the University of Cambridge as a Senior visiting Fellow, after which he joined the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics as an Assistant Professor. He moved to his current position at the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Birmingham in 2000. He has been the director of the University Observatory since 2003, and is in charge of postgraduate admissions for Astrophysics and of the extensive outreach programme of the Astrophysics group.
Dr Raychaudhury's research involves the study of the evolution of galaxies in groups and clusters, and on the supercluster filaments of the cosmic web. He has used optical, X-ray, radio, infrared and ultraviolet observations, from the ground and from Space ,to understand how the transformations of galaxies are related to their local and global environment. He also leads an international collaboration ton developing machine learning algorithms for Astronomical data mining.