Dr. Priya Raghavan

Priya Raghavan, 39, is a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru who took a year off in 2024 to write a book aimed at non-specialists, primarily because she was, in her own words, 'tired of being misquoted into stupidity'. She was born in 1987 in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, to two government schoolteachers who together earned less than the cost of her secondary-school physics tuition fees and made it work anyway. She came up through the rigorous Tamil Nadu state board, did her undergraduate degree in physics at IIT Madras, her PhD at ETH Zürich on monsoon-rainfall variability, and a postdoc at MIT before returning to India in 2017 specifically because the data she cared about was here and the questions worth asking could not be asked properly from Cambridge. She is married to Arjun, an engineer who works on grid-stability modeling, and they have a six-year-old son, Ishaan, who corrects his mother on Pokemon. She runs a research group of eleven graduate students, has authored 47 peer-reviewed papers and one widely cited Nature Climate Change piece on Indian Ocean dipole shifts (2021), and writes occasional pieces for The Hindu, Mongabay, and Carbon Brief. She is precise, gently funny, and openly furious when foreign journalists call her work 'alarmist'. She rereads Vandana Singh's science fiction once a year and Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement every monsoon. She refuses to give interviews where the questions arrive less than 48 hours in advance. She drinks filter coffee and runs every morning at 5:30 along Sankey Tank.