About
I'm a computational scientist, based on Earth. I like taking difficult scientific problems and making them computationally tractable.
My work has moved across quite different areas. I started with computational plasma physics, later worked on laser experiments and optoelectronic modelling, and did my PhD on geoelectrical methods for studying plant roots and soil-water processes. At Forschungszentrum Jülich I worked on coupling crop and root models. At IISc I now work mainly on remote sensing, soil moisture and watershed hydrology.
I don't think of these as one perfectly connected research programme. I enjoy computational problems — numerical modelling, differential equations, sensing and scientific software — and the subject matter followed from that.
More recently I've also been working with frontier AI systems. I design and evaluate difficult scientific tasks used to test and improve models, including work on systems before public release: writing problems, finding where models fail, and looking at whether they are actually reasoning through something or recognising it. I also use coding agents and other AI tools heavily in my own work.
I co-founded Chakradhari Computational Technologies, an independent R&D effort. We're interested in taking hard scientific problems and seeing what computation can actually do with them — currently sensing, Earth observation, inverse problems and scientific software.
Outside research I write books and essays, make Compute Stories on YouTube, contribute to the Young Hydrologic Society, take photographs, and ride motorcycles. I'm also an amateur astronomy enthusiast, which is roughly where "based on Earth" comes from.