I'm a maverick drifter — not quite your run-of-the-mill Homo sapiens.

I've dabbled in many things, stumbled through quite a few, and hope I've nailed at least some.

A Life Across Science, Art, Film, and Travel

I hold a Ph.D. in chemistry and teach college chemistry. I live outside Los Angeles with my wife and three daughters. Over the years our house has also been home to dogs, cats, rabbits, tortoises, snakes, tarantulas, cockroaches, hedgehogs, lizards, uromastyx, and geckos.

I was a Senior Scientist at the University of Arizona and a Consultant for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working on biosignature detection and the atmospheric chemistry of Titan, Saturn's giant moon, during the Cassini–Huygens era.

During the pandemic I founded Art Show International Gallery, an online platform for artists cut off by gallery closures, canceled exhibitions, and vanishing sales. It has since become TERAVARNA, representing artists from 138 countries through online exhibitions, physical shows, and art fairs in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, London, and Paris.

ICE CREAM

Niladri's first Indian film, ICE CREAM, was selected for the Tagore International Film Festival and NABC, New York. It's an intimate and unconventional elegy inspired by personal loss, surreal visuals, unspoken emotions, and poignant symbolisms blended to question how we mourn and remember.

For the last fifteen years my wanderlust has taken me to some of the planet's most remote and remarkable places. Through travel and photography I try to draw attention to environmental change, endangered wildlife, fragile ecosystems, and the cultural range of the communities I pass through.

I've reached 106 countries so far. The plan is all 196 commonly recognized countries, and all seven continents.

In what is now fairly rare spare time, I paint, write, make films, and travel with cameras in tow.