How I Learned About Solar Nebulas From A Four-Year-Old

My family is full of science people. My grandfather, a civil engineer from India, was invited to the US back in the 1960s by MIT. I've got multiple cousins in tech and engineering. And there are so many doctors (and dentists and pharmacists and a psychologist) in my bloodline that I usually get diagnosed and treated through a couple of phone calls.

When I first decided to be a journalist I had the potential to become the black sheep, swimming in prose and profiles while my family saved lives and built things that people needed to survive. And some of my relatives thought that would happen too— to them my career seemed like a hobby, a product of my wanderlust and scribbling.

Then I started reporting on health and science, the topics that felt at once inaccessible and increasingly influential in my daily life. And I quickly found that hard data was far less powerful without the context that I could provide with real voices and ground-level reporting.

That road has meant reporting in multiple countries on multiple platforms. It has meant finding out why the Indian government said a few hundred people were dying of malaria when it was actually tens of thousands, or testing water to find out whether it was causing infertility. Without a human-centered lens, the reports that backed these stories would have been quietly filed away in government offices.

So as it turns out, being one of those "soft" liberal arts people has worked in my favor. As did growing up around my dad's nightly phone consults with his patients, or my grandpa's vision for potable water in India.

I hope to continue bridging that gap at Motherboard. This team works tirelessly not just to cover science and technology, but to discover how these latest developments and cycles will shape our future. For me that means following my curiosity into worlds I don't understand until the synapses fire and the dots connect.

And while I'm pretty sure my family will continue to generate more brilliant scientists, my four-year-old nephew recently read me a book he wrote (with crayon) about solar nebulas. His prose was impeccable.