About Me

Since you’re really curious...

What’s your story?

I was born in 2003 in a suburb of Detroit called Troy to Tamil-speaking immigrant parents from India. Growing up, I loved learning new things, and I took particular interest in natural sciences, geography, and aviation.

By the end of high school, I found myself especially curious about medicine, computational research, and historical linguistics. The first two would become my career, and the latter my most favorite hobby.

In 2022, shadowing in the operating room thrust me into the exciting field of cardiac surgery. As such, I spent the remaining years of college tailoring my research and activities towards it, while filling my free time with reading grammars of languages and parsing through old poems from South India.

In the fall of 2026, I am slated to start medical school, where I hope to continue exploring these interests.

Where are you from?

I’m a proud Michigander, although I speak with a General American accent with only a few of the quirks of Inland North American (“Midwestern”) English. Historically, however, my parents trace their roots to various parts of Cholamandalam (Tamil: சோழமண்டலம் «Čōṛamaṇṭalam»), a region within the south of India.

My paternal grandfather is from Namundi (Tamil: நமுண்டி «Namuṇṭi»), a village whose name has evaded my every attempt to etymologize it. He and my paternal grandmother later settled down in Arni (Tamil: ஆரணி «Āraṇi»), now a large town known for its silk sarees. My maternal grandfather, from Thiruvarur (Tamil: திருவாரூர் «Tiruvārūr»), and my maternal grandmother, from Mettur (Tamil: மேட்டூர் «Mēṭṭūr»), arrived in Madras (Tamil: சென்னை «Čeṉṉai̯») in the 1950s.

My parents, having grown up in Arni and Madras, came to Maryland for their graduate studies and subsequently to Michigan for work. There, my brother and I were born.

As cheesy as it sounds, I consider any place I live at long-term (i. e., every place that I’ve taken my monitor with me to) a place where I’m from. Whether consciously or not, I incorporate aspects of all of these location into my identity.

What’s your research?

Cardiovascular Biomechanics

I model how patients’ hearts and arteries respond to different blood flow conditions and interventions, as a way to improve surgical planning and medical device design.

While the field has been around for a few decades, computational cardiovascular biomechanics has started to take off within the past 10 years, and it has become an integral part of the now-lucrative cardiovascular software industry. It provides key insights into physical mechanisms of both lesions and procedures that cannot otherwise be assessed in a patient-specific manner.

My focus so far has been on aortic disease, ranging from aortic stenosis to aneurysm and dissection. I have a special interest in the optimization and design of endo- and surgical grafts in the repair of these conditions.

Historical Dravidian Linguistics

My work revolves around reconstructing the verbal system in proto-Dravidian, the ancestor of the modern Dravidian languages of South Asia.

Whereas some scholars have reconstructed tense suffixes for proto-Dravidian, not a single (convincing) finite verb reconstruction has ever been published in literature, a far cry from proto-Indo-European. The difficulty remains in the heterogeneity across the family: more often than not, cognate verbs in two languages will take different past-tense suffixes.

Although my interest area stretches across the entire family, I’ve focused mostly on South Dravidian until now, including languages such as Tamil, Toda, Kannada, and Tulu.

Last updated on 2026-04-02.