Charulatha Jain | Mending Thought

Nivedita Mahesh was born and brought up in Coimbatore, India. She received her first research opportunity at Raman Research Institute while pursuing her Bachelor's in Instrumentation engineering at PSG Tech. At RRI she learned the possibilities of using her engineering skills to solve unanswered questions in Astrophysics. There was no looking back from there. She landed a control engineer job at ABB right after undergrad but quickly quit it for a research position back at RRI. She built the first-ever space beam splitter to study our early universe. Understanding the need for more formal education in Electromagnetics, she pursued Electrical Engineering at UCLA. With her goal of still wanting to contribute to research in astronomy, she attended a number of classes in astrophysics in addition to carrying out a research project on White Dwarfs. She then went on to obtain a PhD in Astrophysics at Arizona State University where she worked on two projects - EDGES and FARSIDE. One is located in remote western Australia and with the other, she aims to place a telescope on the Moon's surface! For the FARSIDE project, Nivedita won the NASA FINESST fellowship - her proposal was one among the 26 nationally funded projects that add about 188 entries. After successfully completing her PhD she is set to join the Radio astronomy group at CalTech with the prestigious David and Ellen Lee Prize fellowship. Understanding the need to highlight the achievements of women and women mentors in all walks of life, Nivedita co-founded the initiative Letters For Our Girls which highlights letters of power, hope and dreams fulfilled addressed to South Asian women. Outside of research, you will find Nivedita exploring her passion for dance. She is a trained Bharatanatyam dancer and has been practicing for over 22 years. At ASU she co-founded the Indian classical dance team - Swarajathi. She is always interested in experimenting with the dance form to show more relatable stories to the audience. Currently, she is also learning the BharataNityam extension to learn the Karanas from the original Natya Shastras. She working with her group at ASU to put together a dance production to showcase her Astrophysics Ph.D. thesis. Other than Indian classical dance, Nivedita has dabbled in Bollywood, Hip Hop, and belly dancing at various levels. She has choreographed for cultural events at ASU and started a dance page to continue exploring her second passion.

Crina Bozdog has been working in the Automotive industry for the past 10 years in Germany. She started out as an HMI Developer, became a good C++ programmer and acquired many software development skills, as well as improved her communication skills and came out of her shell and made many long lasting connections, both professionally and personally. Currently , she plays the role of system and software architect along with role of developer with great passion towards software quality. At work she likes to be challenged on a technical level, and wants to build bridges between people and teams, all to deliver quick and high quality solutions to the customers. Still her ultimate goal is to never stop learning something new and to feel challenged everyday. A topic that interests her outside of work is Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, and she hopes to get the chance to work in this field one day. In her private time she likes to cook and enjoys eating good food, especially Indian food; she likes to be active and goes on many walks, and read all kinds of books. Her favorite thing in the world is spending time with the people she loves and enjoying the small things in life together.

E3 is all about Engineering which is specialized in the domain of Space and Research. My guest on Episode 3 is a 26 year old Indian, Prashant G Iyer, the Scientist working in the most reputed national space agency of India , Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram, is the lead center of Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) which is responsible for the design and development of launch vehicle technology. Prashanth's field of interest lies in Space Robotics especially in the development of guidance and control strategies for interplanetary exploration rovers. He is currently working in the field of Trajectory modelling and simulations for Launch vehicles with special focus on validating the control and guidance design. In addition to that he has also been associated working with The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) holding research positions for shorter durations during his UG course. In addition to this he loves cooking, music as mush as he loves the world of space and Stars.

E1 is all about Engineering which is specialized in the domain of Embedded Areas filled with Graphics, Processors and controllers. My guest today is an Indian currently living in UK, Deepak Ravi Kumar, the Software Engineer , who is currently venturing into the world of Graphics. He is predominantly working on the GPUs as Senior Design Engineer . He is smart, dynamic with 10 years of industrial experience. Deepak has worked in a variety of domains from automotive, modems, IOT etc. Deepak feels himself lucky as he has worked in almost all Software layers of CPU, right from the first piece of code that turns the system on ie the BootRom to bootloader, drivers/middleware, application and HMI. His achievements are huge yet he is that humble person who has 5 Patents filed and his Inventions, ideas were always the top notch for the organizations he has worked.