Shiladitya Ray
Shiladitya Ray is a veteran journalist, data storyteller, and astronomy aficionado with nearly a decade of experience covering geopolitics, policy, and science in high-pressure digital newsrooms.
Across his tenures as an Assistant Editor at Mint and Chief Sub-Editor at Deccan Herald, Shiladitya has reported on everything from complex international conflicts to landmark scientific breakthroughs.
At Starlust, Shiladitya narrows his focus exclusively to a lifelong passion: understanding the cosmos. He oversees the site's coverage of deep-sky discoveries, planetary science, and the commercial space race, drawing on his extensive experience of covering major achievements and events in astronomy. Furthermore, his background as an academic editor for Cactus Communications brings a strict, peer-review-level rigor to Starlust's scientific reporting.
A data storyteller at heart with a focus on crafting engaging visual narratives, Shiladitya is a standout fellow of the Google News Initiative (GNI) Data Journalism Lab, where he utilized NASA's extensive exoplanet dataset to build an interactive deep-dive featuring habitability analyses and spatial maps of the 5,000+ discoveries to date. He has also served as a speaker at GNI's AI Skills Lab, instructing senior newsroom editors on the use of generative AI for complex data visualization—expertise he now brings to Starlust.
Shiladitya grew up poring over the astronomical canon of Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, and today, seeks to modernize science communication through interactive storytelling, evoking the sense of wonder and awe that only the cosmos can inspire.
Latest From Shiladitya Ray
'A dark, hot rock': Astronomers directly study exoplanet surface for the first time using JWST
JSWT's direct observation of LHS 3844 b's surface is a massive stepping stone for exoplanet geology.