I may not be $\left\langle e^{tx}\right\rangle$, but I have my moments…

I currently live in Fremont, CA and I’m a researcher in the semiconductor industry. If you go back far enough, I’m originally from Bengaluru, India but I’ve done a bit of bouncing between the south and the west of India while growing up. I was born in Bangalore, but grew up in Pune and I’ve now established roots back in Bengaluru again (yep, the name actually changed in the time that I was gone).

I’m a sucker for all things applied math, and my career trajectory in scientific research has been fairly consistent ever since high school, even though I now work in the private sector.

My broad area of expertise is computational imaging and materials science which happen to be highly inter-disciplinary fields. I spend most of my time figuring out new ways to image things down to a few nanometers by shining light on them. Being able to see what bunches of atoms are doing (a few thousand in a bunch) without destroying what you’re looking at is important if you’re a scientist or an engineer designing a new material, or just trying to understand materials better. This includes people who want to make sure their computer chips have no flaws, design new alloys see how they will behave when you strain or heat them, or scientists studying battery cathodes or catalytic particles in action.

I spent the early years doing such things at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, IL. It is one of the best places for materials research owing to their giant X-ray machine, for which I designed new X-ray imaging methods. A lot of this work was me sitting at a desk simulating such diffraction experiments for different materials, with the occasional week-long experiment at the Advanced Photon Source. I absolutely relish the opportunity to have worked in such a field that involves using a wide range of skills. This is in fact a very exciting, dynamic area of research, and it’s only going to get better in the future.

I was also a post-doc at the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pittsburgh, PA, where I worked on materials discovery using machine learning.

Trivia fragment #1: the world’s first ever nuclear reactor (Chicago Pile-1) is buried somewhere on the old site of the laboratory.

Trivia fragment #2: the X-ray beam at Argonne is so carefully aligned that it is sensitive to earthquakes at the other end of the world.

Trivia fragment #3: My Erdős number is 6. However, I might have lost my chance at an Erdős-Bacon number: I didn’t try hard enough to be an extra in The Dark Knight Rises that was filmed in Pittsburgh back when I was in grad school. Still, it was nice to see downtown Pittsburgh and the Carnegie Mellon University campus briefly dressed up as Gotham City.

At other times, I’m usually playing squash, swimming, looking to learn new math and physics stuff completely orthogonal to my work, trying to achieve Linux supremacy and automate my life, contributing to open-source software or drinking new beers I come across (after all, I am a Bangalorean!). I am a big fan of the great outdoors and have absolutely loved every single one of my hikes, treks and visits to national and state parks around the US. I am appropriately wary of social media but nevertheless get my daily internet fix through a variety of aggregators. The ones I used to favor have been taken over by misguided, part-time free-speech warrior billionaires with an infinitesimal knowledge of social media. I occasionally post stuff that align with my interests, but don't bother looking for me on Facebook, Instagram or Tik-Tok.

My wife Ranjini is from Kochi, India, a mathematician by training, data scientist by trade and Carnatic music enthusiast. We met in Chennai as students way back in 2007. We have a daughter, Sattva.