Devesh Nandal is an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian who builds computer models of how the most massive stars form, evolve and die. His research centers on Population III stars, the first metal-free generation of stars, and on supermassive stars thousands to a million times the mass of the Sun that may have seeded the earliest heavy black holes. He entered the UAP field in 2026, when Avi Loeb named him to a new scientific advisory council and the two published an analysis of a declassified military video.

Nandal's early papers came from the Geneva Observatory of the University of Geneva, where he worked with Georges Meynet and Sylvia Ekström on rotating stellar-evolution models under a European Research Council project. That work included a 2024 study of how primordial stars evolve while accreting gas at very different rates. By 2025 he listed affiliations with the University of Virginia, where he held a VITA-Origins postdoctoral fellowship, and with the Harvard–Smithsonian center, and he led new models of protostars powered by dark-matter annihilation.

His best-known result is a collaboration with Loeb on the "little red dots," compact red sources found by the James Webb Space Telescope. Their 2025 paper argued that a single metal-free star of about a million solar masses could reproduce the objects' brightness and their V-shaped spectrum with one bright hydrogen emission line. Nandal presented the idea at a press conference during the 247th American Astronomical Society meeting in Phoenix in January 2026, describing it as "a single gigantic star in a wispy envelope." The proposal competes with earlier models that explain the dots as black holes wrapped in gas and dust.

In June 2026 Loeb announced that he would chair a UAP Science Advisory Council, saying he had been asked to assemble it to help the ODNI, the FBI and AARO study UAP. Loeb listed Nandal among its founding members for expertise in numerical analysis and astrophysics. That August, Nandal and Loeb released a technical report on DOW-UAP-PR043, a sensor video made public under the PURSUE records effort, reconstructing the camera's position to estimate the object's altitude and motion. Mick West disputed their altitude estimate, arguing that it rested on a tight, poorly conditioned cluster of terrain points and that the object was consistent with something about 13 centimeters across flying level at 20 knots, such as a bird or a balloon. Fernando Longo, a supporter of their approach, praised the pair for publishing their methods, assumptions and limitations in full.

Nandal continues to publish on rotating Population III stars and supermassive stars, and he discusses that research with general audiences, including fall 2026 interviews with John Michael Godier on Event Horizon about the little red dots and other extreme stars. In the UAP record he stands out as a working stellar modeler who applied numerical camera reconstruction to government-released footage, producing a report that drew both praise for its openness and a detailed skeptical rebuttal.