Lakshmi is a freelance science journalist based in Chicago. Her work has appeared in SIAM News, Science News Explores, Quanta, MIT Tech Review, Astronomy and several other outlets. She is a regular blogger, writing about theoretical computer science & math. In 2023, Lakshmi was the Science Journalist in Residence at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC, Berkeley. She revisited the Simons Institute in the same capacity in 2025 and 2026. 

Prior to her freelancing stint, Lakshmi worked as a science liaison and writer at The Alzheimer’s Association based in Chicago, where she whittled a range of complex research topics funded by the Association into lay summaries to raise dementia awareness among a wide audience including donors. 

Lakshmi received her master’s in health, science and environment at the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University in 2017. At Northwestern, she was awarded the Comer fellowship for environmental reporting. She covered several climate-change related stories ranging from solar-powered houses to the study of ice ages to tackle global warming. Lakshmi also has a doctorate in applied mathematics from the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). She used mathematical models to understand how the brain processes information as part of her doctoral thesis. 

In 2020, Lakshmi was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award from NJIT for her contributions to popularizing math among the general public.