I am an energy geoscientist, with an active interest in science education, the recruiting and retention of women in science professions and global access to literacy and literature.

I am a founding member of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists Women’s Network, University of Wisconsin Department of Geoscience alumni board member and advisor to Project Gutenberg, the oldest publisher of free electronic books.

I also publish Back Of Town, a blog-community dedicated to the New Orleans-based HBO television series Treme, and am a contributor to A Howling In The Wires: An Anthology of Writings from Postdiluvian New Orleans. And I enjoy creating Mardi Gras masks and costumes.

I was made in Kuwait of Indian parts. As a result, I speak and read English, Tamil, Hindi, French, Spanish, Sanskrit and Arabic in that order of fluency. An impending move to the United States was hastened by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. I have a B.S. in geology from the University of Illinois and a Masters in structural geology [paper] and an interdisciplinary Masters in computational sciences and geophysics from the University of Wisconsin. My husband, D. Erwin, and I are fans of the Green Bay Packers football team. We have lived in Madison, New Orleans and Ohio before moving to Houston in early 2011.

You can contact me through email or Twitter and my resume is on LinkedIn. Here is a list of articles and interviews. Any opinions I express here and elsewhere online are mine and not those of my employer unless otherwise stated, obviously.

About this blog: What eventually became VatulBlog in the late 1990s began with essays, BBS messages and emails and continues as a record of some of my thoughts and excursions. The site is named Vatul for my clan, which you can read more about here.