Ekta (she/her) is a scholar, advocate and lifelong learner. She was born in the small, urban city of Bayonne, NJ where she grew up until the age of fourteen. As the youngest of three sisters, as well as, the youngest of all of her first cousins on both her maternal and paternal sides, she grew up surrounded by a lively, tight knit family community. Weekends were often filled with adventures led by older cousins and family parties with spreads of rich, Indian cuisine alongside the immigrant’s take on canonical American dishes, such as her Mom’s family-favorite lasagna.

     Though immersed in rich cultural traditions throughout her foundational years, Ekta didn’t come to fully embrace and celebrate her two-fold Indian-American identity until her adulthood. A culmination of leaving family behind to move across the country in pursuit of a Ph.D. in Astronomy & Astrophysics and joining a professional community that is only slowly climbing upwards in the area of first-generation scholars quickly propelled her into seeking her own communities. As such, she has taken on the role of community-builder at multiple stages in her career by advocating for advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in STEM disciplines, so that she and others with shared experiences, especially historically excluded scholars in physics and astronomy, can thrive as their most authentic selves. Ekta is also an avid science communicator who enjoys sharing science with a diverse range of learners.

     Ekta currently resides in the Bay Area where she is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley researching satellite galaxies. When Ekta is not thinking on cosmic scales, she enjoys rock climbing, being outdoors, reading, cuddling with her tiny pups, and cooking with her husband. Ekta is especially interested in preserving her mother’s recipes from Gujarat and other regions of India. She is actively learning her mother’s techniques and compiling recipes into what she hopes will become a family cookbook.