Nari Soundarrajan

"Photos and Websites are static impressions. Videos and Tiktoks are staged often. They don't always capture a changing world or person. Livestreams, well there it is - the best way to know a person online, if you are not able to meet them across a table or in the battlefield"

Energy. Water. Food. Environment. These emanate from the classical elements of FIRE, WATER, EARTH and AIR. I am passionate about their interconnections and especially about the "memory of water".

I love to make processes efficient through a whole systems/ design thinking perspective. My primary focus is still on fire and I'm inspired by Amory Lovins' sayings in "Reinventing Fire" and APJ Abdul Kalam's "Ignited Minds".

In the past decade, I have worked as a strategy and engineering consultant for a firm (Tansa Tech LLC) that I co-founded in 2012 and exited in 2023. My work at Tanstech covered a wide range of sectors: Oil & Gas (Upstream, Midstream), Marine Transportation & Design, Renewables, Battery Electric Energy Storage, Automation, AI/ML applications in Marine and telecom spaces, and Biomass Power.

I have also worked as a Research Scientist at Leidos and a chemical engineer at REM LLC, where both firms were contractors to a premier US DOE Research Laboratory -The National Energy Technology Laboratory at Morgantown WV (NETL). I worked with the Advanced Combustion and Sensors teams, covering topics such as remote sensors development for power plants, gasification technologies, fluidized bed reactions (especially chemicals synthesis), power plant reliability and chemical looping combustion.

I have had the good fortune to have lived in 3 different countries so far (India, Germany, USA) and also have close ties to Nepal,especially on biodiversity conservation.

In my free time, I love to make good food with aromatic spices and share it with friends over a good story. My dream is to build my cooking caravan (a mobile kitchen aka “Spice truck”) that I can use to travel and spread the joy of flavouring with spices.

Spending time in nature, and photographing birds is another way I love to relax.