July 6, 2026

The Winds of Aeolus: Why I Got into Science

In school I was good at science and mathematics, and for a long time that was the whole of it. The subject became personal when my uncle, after fighting HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis for years, lost that battle. I was young, and I remember deciding that I wanted to work on problems like his. As I grew older it became clear that my abilities and instincts pointed toward physics rather than medicine, and I followed them.

What reconciled me to that choice was reading about physicists whose work had changed what medicine and technology could attempt at all. Marie Curie's work on radioactivity, Planck's introduction of the quantum, and Einstein's papers redefined for me what physics could reach. The story of superconductivity impressed me most: entire families of materials behaving in a way that seemed, on first reading, impossible. At some point I stopped feeling that I had abandoned the original plan. Physics was a different route toward the same end.

Studying materials science in Bangalore changed how I saw the world. Everything tangible is materials science. Everything is made of atoms, and most of what humans build depends on our ability to arrange them: the steel in a bridge, the silicon in a phone, the drugs in a pharmacy. Astronomy and cosmology advance on detectors and mirrors, biology rests on the physics of soft matter, and even geopolitics is shaped to a remarkable degree by materials and the economics of their supply. I have not been able to see the world differently since.

As an undergraduate I was drawn to smart materials, the ones that respond to their surroundings: shape-memory alloys that recover a programmed form, piezoelectrics that convert strain into voltage, thermoelectrics that turn waste heat into electricity. The campus also offered research seminars nearly every week, and to an undergraduate each one sounded groundbreaking. Some of them probably were. Their lasting effect was that research stopped being something other people did.

My research today centers on magnetism. I use neutrons to measure how spins arrange, move, and couple inside quantum materials, and the history of the field is part of why I find it worth a career. Néel received the Nobel Prize for his fundamental work on antiferromagnetism and ferrimagnetism, the forms of magnetic order on which most of my own work rests. Shull and Brockhouse received it for developing neutron scattering, which in the words of the Nobel committee showed where atoms are and what atoms do; that remains a fair description of my daily work. Van Vleck, Anderson, and Mott were recognized for the theory of magnetic and disordered systems, and Fert and Grünberg for giant magnetoresistance, the effect behind the read heads of modern hard disks. Superconductivity, the fascination of my school years, has stayed close as well, since magnetism and superconductivity are intertwined in many of the materials I study.

I did not end up curing anything, and my uncle remains the quiet reason underneath all of it. I have come to believe, however, that the long route matters. The physics of materials sits upstream of nearly every technology that eventually reaches a hospital bed. That is why I got into science, and it is why I stay.