Personal Overview

I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Aerospace, Physics and Space Sciences and the GRASP Chair (viz., Director of Graduate Studies) for the Physics & Space Sciences Program at the Florida Institute of Technology (Florida Tech). In addition, I hold secondary appointments (Affiliate Faculty) in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering and the Department of Mathematics and Systems Engineering at Florida Tech.

After completing my undergraduate degree in Engineering Physics at the Indian Institute of Technology (Bombay), I moved to the USA and obtained my Ph.D. in Physics at The University of Texas at Austin in theoretical physics. Afterwards, I carried out postdoctoral research in plasma astrophysics at Princeton University, which was followed by postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University (applied mathematics) and the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (astrophysics and astrobiology).

My research interests are situated primarily within the transdisciplinary domain of astrobiology from a physical sciences perspective. As a theorist, my research is mostly oriented towards modeling (i.e., via both pen-and-paper calculations and numerical simulations) the following areas:

1. Laws of Living Systems: uncovering the (bio)chemical and (bio)physical processes that shape (extra)terrestrial life in diverse environments, with an emphasis on understanding organisms acquire, process, act upon, and share information.

2. Planetary Habitability: understanding how stellar processes (e.g., electromagnetic radiation, winds, space weather), planetary factors (e.g., magnetic fields, tidal forces, oceans), and high-energy astrophysical phenomena in the Milky Way (e.g., active supermassive black holes) regulate the potential for life across space and time.

3. Biosignatures and Technosignatures: identifying possible (exo)planetary biosignatures and technosignatures (e.g., chlorofluorocarbons), in conjunction with assessing their detectability and determining their accompanying false positives.

4. Origin(s) of life and multicellularity: quantifying the likelihood of the origin(s) of life and multicellularity, and studying the role(s) of environmental physicochemical factors in facilitating these transitions (e.g., wet-dry cycling and information sensing).

5. Space Exploration: designing life-detection missions to targets in the solar system (e.g., Venus, Europa, Enceladus, Planet 9) and beyond (e.g., interstellar objects and free-floating planets) using conventional (e.g., chemical rockets) and novel (e.g., light sails) propulsion systems.

As my Ph.D. and initial postdoctoral research was in plasma physics, I continue to work regularly in this field. Areas that I have investigated over the past several years include Hamiltonian and Lagrangian formulations for plasma models, fluid models that accurately encapsulate collisional effects, generation of small- and large-scale magnetic fields, magnetic turbulence (e.g., in the solar wind), and fast magnetic reconnection believed to drive explosive phenomena such as stellar/solar flares.

Finally, I have dabbled in a few other areas such as bioenergetic constraints on early human evolution; deep learning applications to astrodynamics; electronic structure calculations of photosynthetic pigments; and the history and philosophy of science.