About me

Towards Climate Change and Social Impact: My interests in physical science and nature have long inspired me to think about and work towards mitigating climate change.

As a graduate student in an interdisciplinary department, I contributed to a publication ‘Arctic Ice Management’ (Desch et al. 2017, See Publications) led by my phD advisor Prof. Steven Desch, who came up with a uniquely novel climate solution to restore ice in the Arctic and, thereby, halt a strong positive feedback towards global warming.

After my postdoctoral research, I continued to learn and understand different climate sectors and solutions through an online Fellowship by Climatebase. I also completed an intensive Foundations course at Regenerative Intelligence (RegenIntel) where I learned about systems thinking in the context of sustainability, and how the inextricably linked problems of climate change, social development, and nature restoration require a systemic approach for transformative change. I also pursued certifications in data science, GIS and Remote sensing to help me work with spatial data to analyze climate-related data and policy implementation.

I am currently interested in working with spatial data, to mitigate the impacts of climate change, improve community climate resilience, and build systemic solutions in climate that are planet-positive and regenerative.

I am also interested in making knowledge accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds.

My PhD work: I graduated with a PhD from Arizona State University in December 2018, from an incredibly interdisciplinary department, School of Earth & Space Exploration (SESE). For my thesis, I had worked with Prof. Steven Desch on modeling disks with non-uniform turbulent viscosity, understanding their structure and evolution over time. My thesis also focused on modeling various radial transport processes of volatiles in disks, and understanding how the interplay of all these processes shaped the radial distribution of water in disks, leading to the abundances (eg. as ice-rock ratios) in asteroidal bodies and eventually planets that we see and the one we live on today.

Past Postdoctoral Astrophysics Research: I formerly worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Physics at Texas State University with Prof. Andrea Banzatti, where, along with Andrea and his students, we studied the delivery and distribution of water in protoplanetary disks and compared my numerical disk evolution models with observations taken with IR spectra and mm-interferometry as well as models of pebble accretion.

My origin story in Astronomy: I did not know I wanted to be an astrophysicist when I was 6, or 10 or 13. But sometime after that, I did realize that I wanted to be a scientist. Astronomy, though, happened wholly unexpectedly when I found myself in my undergraduate college campus, in the heart of Southern India, with crystal-clear skies that I, being city-bred, had never seen before. What followed after that was not unlike a sci-fi inter-dimensional journey, where I moved from doing instrumentation for astronomy, to planetary astronomy analyzing cometary images, to modeling protoplanetary disks and its chemistry. I am thankful to my kind mentors for the opportunities they gave me to pursue these paths.