Vijay Kumar Kapahi (21 January 1944 – 16 March 1999) was an Indian astrophysicist and the director of the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, an autonomous division of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

[2][note 2] His pre-graduate and graduate studies were completed at St. Joseph's College, Bangalore (then under Mysore University) in 1959 and 1962 respectively before his move to Mumbai where he did a one-year course at BARC Training School.

[4] During his service at TIFR, he simultaneously pursued his doctoral studies mentored by Swarup and secured a PhD from Bombay University in 1975 for his thesis, Angular structures of extragalactic radio sources and cosmology.

[28] He was also a member of the Indian Physics Association and International Astronomical Union[5] and the doctoral scholars mentored by him included Joydeep Bagchi, Dhruba Jyoti Saikia, Prajval Shastri, C. H. Ishwar-Chandra and Ramana Athreya.

[30] He received the Henri Chretien Research Grant Award of the American Astronomical Society in 1991 and became an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy in 1997.