Arun's Knowledge Graph
About Me
I get excited about figuring things out, which has taken me on a rather wandering path across continents and disciplines.
If we’re going by standard buckets, I’d call myself a theoretical physicist-turned-data scientist, but my interests are all over the place, so I’d rather not be stuck with that label.
The Journey
Curiosity about the quantum foundations took me from India to Munich, where I worked with the late Detlef Dürr on Bohmian mechanics. His research group was full of people who were inquisitive, and deeply cared about the work they did. This was where I started looking at systems with the bottom-up approach — figuring out how to formulate a theory that ontologically describes how nature works at a fundamental level, with the constraints of having to describe known phenomena.
I went to Tucson planning to work with Sam Gralla on the self-force problem, but ended up getting sucked into black hole physics instead. The PhD years in Arizona were intense in ways I didn’t expect. I got really good at sitting with hard problems for months without making progress, then suddenly seeing the path forward. Somewhere along the way, I also started caring about the math itself, not just what it could tell me about black holes.
Then Schnucki showed up with those brown eyes and infinite capacity for love, and suddenly being with her in a place where she could run around freely became a priority. Seattle called — I’m a sucker for gloomy, drizzly weather and the beautiful outdoors. I was fortunate to find my first position outside academia at Rover, working with genuinely amazing people, and everything clicked differently. Instead of “What fundamental dynamics make this happen?” I started asking “What can we actually figure out from messy, real-world data?”. I went from exact solutions and clean equations to thinking in distributions and probabilities. Turns out that adding programming to your toolkit allows you to ask questions that you’d never even think of asking if you didn’t have those techniques under your belt.
Long-term immigration stability brought me to Vancouver in 2024. Now I’m doing Stanford’s AI program while consulting for Turno (another 2-sided marketplace, because apparently I have a type). These days I’m obsessed with where game theory, reinforcement learning, and economics overlap — it’s this sweet spot where bottom-up and top-down thinking actually play nice together. And yeah, like everyone else, I’m trying to figure out what to do with large language models.
Education
Stanford University | Remote
AI Graduate Certificate | Sep 2024 - present
The Data Incubator | Remote
Data Science Fellowship | Feb 2021 - May 2021
University of Arizona | Tucson, AZ
PhD in Physics | Aug 2015 - Jul 2021
Ludwig Maximilians University | Munich, DE
Visiting student for Master’s thesis | Aug 2013 - Jul 2014
Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences | Hyderabad, India
MSc in Physics & Bachelors in Pharmacy | Aug 2009 - Jul 2014
Experience
Turno | Vancouver, BC
Data Scientist | Sep 2024 - present
Rover | Seattle, WA
Data Scientist II & III | Sep 2021 - Sep 2024
If you’re interested in more specifics of what I’ve done professionally, you can find more details on my Resume and on LinkedIn.
Interactive Exploration
The graph above shows the interconnected nature of my journey - you can:
- Hover over nodes to see the 3D distance-based effects
- Click nodes for detailed descriptions
- Use the layer controls to focus on specific aspects (Education, Research, Industry, Current Focus, Geographic)
- Navigate the timeline to see how things evolved over time
- Use the minimap to quickly jump to different areas
Each connection represents how one experience led to or influenced another. The stronger the connection, the more direct the influence. You’ll notice that geographic moves often coincided with major career transitions, and that the bottom-up thinking approach from quantum foundations continues to influence my current work in AI and game theory.
The questions keep changing, but I’m still just as curious about complex systems — whether they’re quantum foundations, black holes, markets, or whatever’s next.