About me

Where I am now: As of June 2020, I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at Texas State University with Prof. Andrea Banzatti. I work with Andrea, his students and our collaborators to connect my numerical models on the distribution of water in disks with observations taken with IR spectra and mm-interferometry.

I am also interested in understanding how water in its various phases moved around and was distributed in the early solar nebula, resulting in the solar system we see today (and at least one planet teeming with life!)

Research Interests: Protoplanetary disk – structure and evolution, snow lines, volatiles; Solar system science – early chemistry, minor planets;  Astrobiology

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.

My origin story: 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.