Kishalay De is a NASA Einstein Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kishalay's research interests lie in the transient optical/infrared sky to search for cataclysmic explosions in the Milky Way and in distant galaxies. De helped build the first wide-field infrared time domain survey, Gattini-IR at Palomar Observatory, that surveys three quarters of the sky every two nights. By looking in the near-infrared, De’s work revealed a population of dust obscured eruptions (novae, X-ray binaries, microlensing events and young stars) that are missed in optical surveys. De is currently working on systematic searches for eruptions from binary stars (stellar mergers, planetary engulfment events, young star outbursts) in the local universe using infrared surveys like Gattini-IR and the Wide-field Infrared Surveyor (WISE), and designing future searches with upcoming surveys like WINTER, PRIME, the Rubin Observatory and the Roman Space Telescope.