I am a Portland-based science journalist covering health, medicine, biology, and whatever else fascinates me on a given day. My work has appeared in The New York Times, NPR, Discover, Undark, Science, Nature, and many other publications. My article in The Open Notebook on using sensory details to enrich a science story is anthologized in The Craft of Science Writing, published in 2020.

I grew up in New Delhi and Ahmedabad, and moved to snowy Buffalo, NY, to do a doctorate in microbiology. I plated staphylococci and streptococci, and dreamed up epic battles between my bacteria and the bacteria-dwelling viruses I studied. But reviewers kept telling me that my thesis and drafts of scientific papers had too much story in them. I eventually took their not-so-subtle hints and enrolled in the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where that kind of behavior was encouraged. Since then, I have written about clinical trial ethics, bioelectricity, maternal microbiomes, parasitic vines that could be lightning rods, and more. My reporting on clinical research, health and bioethics has been supported by fellowships from the Association of Health Care Journalists and the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT.