A more readable (?) bio

After a childhood that involved growing up in Los Angeles, Bangalore, and Kanpur, I joined the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1999 for an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Engineering. Driven mostly by an interest in math, and partly by a horror of Operating Systems, my interests veered towards Theoretical Computer Science. TCS had this heady mix of simple to state problems with deep mathematical rigor that seduced me right from my first algorithms course. When I finished in 2003, I went to Princeton for graduate school in TCS. Advised by Bernard Chazelle, I specialized in property testing and sublinear algorithms. This subfield of TCS studies what can be determined about a massive input without actually reading all of it. Philosophically, it demonstrates the incredible power of randomization for algorithmics. Wrapping up in 2008, I set out to the brown hills (green in winter) of San Jose for a postdoc at IBM Almaden.

Two carefree years, shielded from mundane concerns of funding, were spent at the Principles and Methodologies (aka Theory) Group at Almaden. In 2010, I joined Sandia National Laboratories, Livermore as a researcher, interested in gaining an applied focus and determined not to leave the Bay Area. My focus shifted towards applying TCS, especially randomization and sampling, to real world problems involving large data. As I got more into practical algorithms, I also worked on modeling real data and trying to design provable algorithms that work well in practice. I spent four incredible years at Sandia, and learned a great deal from the diverse research staff. It really forced me to think about my research from a bigger perspective. I learned how challenging and rewarding it is to discuss and collaborate with people outside my field (and comfort zone). In 2015, I joined UCSC as an assistant professor of Computer Science.