About Me

I am a physicist and aerospace engineer who has taken up data science as a profession. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area with my wonderful wife and a beautiful daughter. My roots are Indian.

I like working at the intersection of science and business; marketplaces are my natural habitat in this regard. I enjoy writing good code, thinking about marketplaces, statistics and inference, and ML. I am known to write the occasional paper; I used to write a lot more in my academic life. I also know a fair bit of fracture mechanics, statistical physics, complex systems, and the like. I have operated a TEM (Tunneling Electron Microscope), and a lathe. I like hiking and the outdoors.

I have degrees (or pay stubs) to prove the following:

I am a director of machine learning and data science by current employment (Shipt)

I am a data scientist (Pricing, Marketplaces, Optimization, IoT) by recent employment (Samsara/Lyft).

I am a material scientist (Miller Fellow, UC Berkeley, LBNL) by post-graduate training.

I am a physicist (Ph.D., Statistical Physics, Cornell) by graduate training.

I am a rocket scientist (B.Tech., Aerospace Engineering, IIT Kanpur) by undergraduate training.

I have had the good fortune of having these extraordinary scientists as mentors and/or close collaborators (in reverse chronological order of latest association):

• Prof. Garrett van Ryzin, Business School, Cornell University
• Prof. Robert Ritchie, Materials Science, UC Berkeley
• Prof. Mark Asta, Materials Science, UC Berkeley
• Prof. James Sethna, Physics, Cornell University
• Prof. Sidney Resnick, Operations Research, Cornell University