Hi, welcome to my blog. Moon Chariot is a direct translation of my name in Sanskrit; Poonam, my first name, means Full Moon, and Rath means Chariot. A symbol, a metaphor, a flight of fancy - make of it what you will.
I like reading widely, conducting scientific inquiry, and writing to demystify and understand. I practice yoga, both as a student and as a teacher.
I don’t have an abiding philosophy today, but hold the view that life is its own evolving entity with an open invitation for us to participate in its narrative and transform ourselves. I haven’t figured out a rational set of constraints to define this blog; I’d like to simply start and shape the bricolage on the way.
I have a PhD in Immunology and Microbiology, investigating how microbes manage to lurk around in us longer than common decency deems acceptable (think years), dance furtively around our body’s natural and learned methods of defense, and often, in what is a flagrant display of opportunistic pathogenicity, attack and impair our health and vitality. I also did a postdoc stint in modeling resilience in health-perturbing conditions like infections: looking at wide-ranging data gathered at the behavioral, cellular and gene expression-levels, can we distinguish paths taken by those of us who bounce back to health as opposed to the rest of us who get stuck in stubborn little pockets of sickness?
In the last couple of years, other than being a recovering academic, I have been a foot soldier in the field of Machine Learning and applied my technical skills to train models to make predictions. Predictions, made in a timely manner, can bend the arc of a system that would otherwise have continued on its merry way to unhappy outcomes. The system in question and its underlying data has varied across jobs, ranging from the health records of populations to text-rich exchanges between two parties. The desired outcomes, then, can range from discovering the right patient subgroup suited for a personalized treatment or a clinical trial to swift resolution of two-way communications in customer-provider relationships.
In my personal mental model, I keep an eye out for patterns and enjoy drawing parallels between seemingly disparate areas, appreciating complexity but also savoring simple takeaways.
I live in San Francisco with my three year-old daughter, and my husband. I have been caught uttering the words “I’m ready to put down roots” though my actions stand in sharp contrast. I grew up all over India and, since moving to the US a decade and half ago, have been hopping back and forth between the coasts. I have moved houses more times than my daughter has learned to count, and continue to put off unpacking the perilously perched tower of brown boxes containing books and what I believe must be an important assortment of paraphernalia. Perhaps I remain adrift secretly looking for a hint of magic in new beginnings. I call this the Dandelion Paradox.