India, April 25 -- Walking home from his University of Cambridge office late at night, Nikku Madhusudhan would often look at the sky and wonder whether we were really alone in the universe.

The professor of astrophysics and exoplanetary science had always been fascinated by how the world works. As a young man, he studied geotechnical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology at Banaras Hindu University (IIT-BHU). He then earned a Master's researching electromagnetic properties of meta-materials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This was followed by a PhD in astrophysics at MIT, where he developed a novel method for inferring the atmospheric properties of exoplanets (planets outside our solar system). He took on ...