My professional journey started with a Ph.D. in Neuroscience researching the neural basis for the effects of stress on learning, memory and cognition at the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India.
I moved to the United States after receiving my Ph.D. as a post-doctoral fellow researching the neural basis for decision-making at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pensylvania(https://www.upenn.edu/). The research spanned trying to understand how the brain interprets and converts sensory information into a decision - for both visual and auditory modalities.
I moved to industry & data science in 2016 - which was just beginning to take off as an alternate profession for ex-acadmics like me. I was fortunate to get into a academia-to-industry bootcamp called Insights Data Science. It was one of the formative experiences of my professional life - the 12 week program not only helped fill the many gaps in my understanding of data science by learning from and interacting with my peers and experts in the field that were invited to speak, but also gave me my first indirect taste of entrepreneurship.
After Insights, I spent a couple of years at Gartner, working as an entry level Business Associate across a couple of their BUs. Learnt a lot about corporate culture, how large organizations work, how legacy industries think about technology and to some extent - what distinguishes tech startups and MAGMAs (Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple) from the rest.
This was followed by 4 years at Iqvia, during which I saw a lot of professional growth. My responsibilites spanned everything from individial contributor roles to managing a global team of data scientists and engineers. It’s actually hard to summarize everthing I learnt there in a short paragraph, but needless to say - it was a great experience (posts about my time at Iqvia).
Most recently, I worked on Panily - which was borne out of a personal experience. I was diagnosed with gout (a form of arthritis) a few years ago, and the period of time before being diagnosed was very difficult. It was hard to remember the details of what happened when, even though the details would have been important for diagnosis and treatment. This inspired me to build the Panily apps and try to build a B2C company around the apps.
Hobbies and Interests
Avid Philadlephia Eagles and Miata fan, I enjoy hiking, travelling and food. I love photography, but it’s mostly fallen off since the loss of my camera & kit in Geneva many years ago.