Outside research, I make time for science communication, debate, sport, philosophy, and the people around me.
Scientists are trained to generate knowledge. They are rarely trained to communicate it to the people who make decisions with it. I am interested in that gap because it shapes whether evidence is actually useful.
Before I spent my days arguing with climate models, I spent them arguing in committee rooms. As an Executive Board member at Model United Nations conferences, I learned to understand competing positions, manage a room, and distil hours of debate into something that moves forward.
Debate taught me that a well-framed argument matters as much as a correct one. That lesson travels into research.
I was also President of IISER Bhopal's Debating Society, helping to build a culture where people could defend uncomfortable positions.
Sport is where I switch the analytical part of my brain off. It works about 60% of the time.
I run regularly, partly for fitness and partly because it is the one hour of the day where nothing requires a citation. I also play Pickleball, Table Tennis, and Squash, all at a level best described as "competitive but humbling."
I also hold a PADI Open Water Diver certification. Scuba is a different kind of attention: slow, quiet, bodily, and very good at reminding you that the physical world is not an abstraction.
"Have the courage to use your own understanding": Kant's definition of Enlightenment. It is also, I think, a reasonable definition of what science communication should be trying to do.A thought I keep coming back to
Not as a discipline, but as a set of live questions that keep showing up in my work whether I invite them or not.
Research is how I spend most of my time. These are the things that remind me why it matters, and that there is more to the world than the next dataset.
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