He attended St Xavier's Collegiate School, Kolkata, from which he ranked second in the Madhyamik examination of the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education, 1977.

[12] Somak Raychaudhury became the fourth Director of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune India, in September 2015.

He was Professor and Head of Physics at Presidency University, Kolkata,[13] where he was also the Dean of the Faculty of Natural and Mathematical Sciences till August 2015.

[14] He remains affiliated to the Astrophysics and Space Research group, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Birmingham, where he used to be the director of the Wast Hills Observatory[15] for the period 2003–2012.

Raychaudhury's research interests lie in 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 to understand how the transformations of galaxies are related to their local and global environment.