Grew up in Vizag, a coastal city in India where the sea is five minutes from everywhere and the pace of life actually lets you think. Quiet, clean, good food. Then moved to Chennai for uni at SRM, and that's where everything started to pick up speed.

I'd always been drawn to storytelling. Theatre, direction, making things. In university I joined the Movies & Dramatics Club, and the president was running a clothing brand startup on the side. He needed a designer. I had no formal training, just curiosity and a lot of time on Figma. First real challenge: the cart icon felt wrong for clothes. Nobody puts clothes in a cart. They hang them. So I drew a hanger icon from scratch with the pen tool. Built a horizontal scroll that felt like browsing through a real wardrobe. That decision got noticed. Calls started coming in from other entrepreneurs, student clubs, early-stage teams. I had no plan. It just kept going.

The more I worked with people, the more I understood: design isn't about what I find beautiful. It's about what someone else can use without needing a manual. A product works when a first-grader and an 85-year-old both reach for it the same way. That shift changed how I think about everything.

CS and Business Systems degree in hand, I started noticing a gap. Good design without evidence is decoration. Started bridging data analytics with product work. Computacenter UK hired me during my final year. A year in, my manager asked me something I still think about: not how do we fix this problem, but why does this problem exist in the first place. Root cause over symptom. Completely different game.

Came to the US for my MS in Data Science + UX Research at University of Maryland. Joined Hack4Impact as sole Product Designer and redesigned a full recruitment system handling 750+ applicants per semester, presented to stakeholders including Microsoft Reston and CMNS directors. Then interned at MarketCrunch AI in San Francisco as their sole designer. Audited the full product, shipped features, helped grow MAU roughly 16x.

After the internship I watched a TED talk by a NASA-affiliated data scientist at UMD and sent her a cold email. One coffee chat later I was in her lab. Now building Xylem Institute, turning 3-day satellite data pipelines into 30-minute policy bulletins for analysts across 9 countries. Designed the brand, the UX, the entire system. In March 2026 they flew me to Nairobi, Kenya to train professionals on the tools I'd built. Watching them use it without any confusion, no hand-holding needed. That's the whole point.

Alongside all of that, I creative-directed Terps Esports at UMD. Motion graphics, brand identity, event shoots. Started as a one-off project and turned into a full creative operation over two years.

Off the clock: I've been collecting Marvel, Star Wars and comic action figures since I was five. It started with Kinder Joy superhero capsules — my parents used them to get me to eat, and I kept every single one. The first full figure I got was Spider-Man. I'm well into my 50s now. Every one of them has a story. My dad also used to bring home Lego sets when I was a kid. Building them was meditative, but what I remember most is losing one piece and the whole set feeling incomplete. That stuck with me more than I expected. A thing is either finished or it isn't. Applies to design the same way.