Meet a Quantum Physicist: She Cools Atoms with Lasers

Everyone has heard the word “quantum.” Almost no one has met a person who actually does quantum physics. Sindhu Jammi has been doing exactly that since she was 21 — building systems to work in the quantum regime, such as cooling atoms to a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero and interacting with them. It is the real, hands-on craft behind a word most students only ever meet in a YouTube video.

Her path has taken the same craft across four countries. She did her BS and MS at IISER Pune, with her masters work on cold atoms. From there: a PhD in atomic physics at the University of Nottingham in the UK; research in the United States building compact atomic-clock and quantum-sensor experiments at a national lab and university; and a senior scientist role in a quantum-technology company in Australia, working on sensors precise enough to help things navigate when there is no GPS.

Today she has come home, working on Quantum Communications experiments at the Raman Research Institute in Bengaluru — the institute founded by Sir C.V. Raman. Join us for an honest conversation about what “quantum” really means when you do it with your hands, what it takes to keep starting over in a new country, and what she would tell a curious student who loves how the world works.

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What do doctors really do? There’s one picture we get from medical drama TV shows — a surgeon under bright lights with a scalpel, while machines beep and someone says “we’re losing him.” Many students in school feel like medicine requires artistic skills (to draw all those diagrams) and a lot of memorisation. We also think that specialisation is the name of the game — you study for 10+ years until you become a really specific, highly paid surgeon. But there are many paths that a medical doctor can take.

Dr. Sanjana SN is a public health expert who trained in emergency medicine and intensive care. She is a diabetologist and general physician who runs her own clinic. But her main job is in a space where most of us don’t picture doctors at all. As a founding team member at a health-technology company, she helps build the software Indian doctors use every day: the systems that hold your medical history, and the AI that listens to a consultation and writes up the notes.

She got there by choosing the branch of medicine families warn you away from — public health, the study of whole populations rather than single patients. Years later, it turned out to be exactly the training nobody else had.