Lakshmi Supriya got her BSc in Industrial Chemistry from IIT Kharagpur (India) and a Ph.D. in Polymer Science and Engineering from Virginia Tech (USA). She has more than a decade of global industry experience working in the USA, Europe, and India.
After her Ph.D., she worked as part of the R&D group in diverse industries starting with semiconductor packaging at Intel, Arizona, where she developed a new elastomeric thermal solution, which has now been commercialized and is used in the core i3 and i5 processors. From there she went on to work at two startups, one managing the microfluidics chip manufacturing lab at a biotechnology company and the other developing polymer formulations for oil extraction from oil sands. She also worked at Saint Gobain North America, developing various material solutions for photovoltaics and processing techniques and new applications for fluoropolymers. Most recently, she managed the Indian R&D team of Enthone (now part of MacDermid) developing electroplating technologies for precious metals.
Lakshmi has extensive experience in material characterization, project conception and planning, and taking a concept from the initial phase to successful pilot level manufacturing, including statistical process control for manufacturing processes. All this experience included significant contributions to intellectual property with several issued and pending patents.
Along with her corporate work, Lakshmi started editing and proofreading technical articles around 5 years ago, and has been both a freelancer and contract editor. Along the way, a short workshop on science journalism sparked her interest in science journalism and science writing.
She has been a freelance science journalist and science writer since 2016 and has written for publications such as The Wire, Science, and New Scientist. She chooses to write about anything interesting, curious, and quirky. The topics she has written about include climate, environment, physics and chemistry, biology, and technology. When she is not working, her time is devoted to her family that includes two little children, reading, and traveling.