My career has been oriented around empathy, a quality so embedded in my multicultural upbringing that it has come to shape all facets of my life.

At the age of 4, I began translating between my Mandarin-speaking mother, Tamil-speaking grandmother and English-speaking father. The experience set me up for a life oriented around giving voice to divergent perspectives, and understanding cultural cosmologies with the aim of building bridges between them.

I began my professional career as a broadcast journalist at Hong Kong's TVB News where I covered stories spanning political protests, murders, human rights, climate change and natural disasters. I later moved to Malaysia to establish the country's first independent online news station in the run-up to its 13th General Elections. In under three months, my reports and talkshows on KiniTV generated close to a million views, especially connecting the Malaysian diaspora with changes happening back home. My work has also been featured on CNN International, ABC News, and CCTV. Watch my news reel here.

In 2014, I was awarded the prestigious Hong Kong PhD Fellowship (HKPF) award, and decided to pursue my PhD research with a community whose perspectives never made it onto the news. I spent a year conducting immersive, ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia's rainforest among an indigenous tribe known for its millennia-long commitment to peace and non-violence. What can the world learn from them, my research asks, anchored around debates surrounding cosmopolitanism and world citizenship. My dissertation explores themes including religion and development, resistance, social change, cultural and identity, de-colonizing methodologies, collaborative ethnography, feminist research methods and subaltern cosmopolitanism.

Pairing my life-transforming research experience with the exigencies of the future of technology and humanity, I currently consult for a range of organizations, including an AR tech startup that wants to identify the ethical and social implications of its products features.