As a scientist…

Hi, I’m Janvi! I’m a graduate student worker pursuing a PhD in Astrophysics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. I work with Dr. Charlotte Welker at CUNY and Dr. Colin Norman at JHU. You can find details about my current project using cosmological hydrodynamic simulations here. Working with Charlotte and an amazing team of undergraduate students, masters students, PhD students, and postdocs, I have found my science home in the Gotham Web Lab. We study everything from star formation histories, dwarf galaxies, and galactic dynamics to large-scale structure and the cosmic web. We are a group of both observers and theorists. Learn more about the talented scientists in our group by visiting our website, here!

As a researcher in astrophysics, I am most interested in answering cosmological questions about the birth of the universe, inflation, dark energy driven expansion, and structure formation and evolution. I am also interested in computationally modeling cosmological phenomena to help us answer these questions. You can find a link to my CV here or you can click the little book icon at the top right of the page.

Towards a new world…

I am interested in social movements broadly and organizing and building movements that center dignity and care. Most of my free time is spent organizing in my community and workplace. I deeply believe in anchoring into a collective practice of taking care of each other in a politics of interdependence. Putting care at the center of our relationships with each other and the natural world, I am driven to organize against the exploitation of our labor, the extraction of resources, and all systems that prioritize profit over people and the planet from an anti-imperialist and abolitionist framework.

Graduate workers in TRU-UE 197 on the picket line at Johns Hopkins. Baltimore, MD. February 20, 2024.

I, along with hundreds of others, helped build the graduate worker union, Teachers and Researchers United, UE Local 197, at Johns Hopkins. From winning our union recognition campaign to bargaining our very first contract to seeing it through to its current formation – a strong, member-led union that builds collective power from the grassroots and fights for not only workplace rights locally but with the recognition that our labor is part of much larger, internationalist geography and our struggles are materially linked– being part of the rising tide of graduate labor has been a transformative experience in my life. You can read some of my reflections about the role of organized grad labor in the current political moment in this roundtable interview.

As a labor organizer in the city of Baltimore, I have really grappled with the ways in which my and my coworkers’ wage relationship with Johns Hopkins University contributes to the organized abandonment, incarceration, and policing of Black communities in the city. I spend most of my time outside of science, struggling together with my neighbors and other labor organizers across unions, to build grassroots power and a labor coalition against the privatized expansion of armed policing in our streets. In doing this work, I realized that my research and technical skills could be of service in helping lend scientific credibility to the lived experiences of various communities most at risk of state violence. I take a lot of inspiration from abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and for several years have been working to make use of my programming and data analysis skills at the intersection of critical geography and on-ground movement building.

My friend and I are working on publishing a critical geography project to map Baltimore, understand the networks of power, control, resistance, and struggle that run through our geography and help build a collective imagination for what infrastructure could be built to make freedom a place. I hope to share it here soon!

I am committed to struggling for a world that I know is possible for us to build, one that I am positioned to help construct as a scientist, and one that I am committed to constructing both within and without the academy.

Friends and comrades. Baltimore, MD. February 1, 2023.