Sena Desai Gopal

Sena Desai Gopal lived in Pune, India, for the first 25 years of her life. On completing her master’s in Environmental Science from Pune University and Tropical Agricultural and Environmental Science from the University of Newcastle, England, she worked on a World Bank-funded project analyzing the effectiveness of Indian school textbooks in sensitizing students to environmental issues. Following this she worked as a staff writer for InfoChange, India, a non-profit development news channel covering issues of marginalized communities in India.

In 2001, she came to Boston, U.S.A., to do her master’s in Science and Medical Journalism at Boston University. She interned as a science writer at Focus, the Harvard Medical School newsletter, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab near Chicago. She was employed as a staff science writer for Georgia State University in Atlanta for a year before she moved back to Boston to marry Dr. Harsha Gopal. She currently writes weekly for the Science and Health section of the Boston Globe.

Sena Desai Gopal has freelanced for a number of publications including The Times of India, Technology Review, Nature Network Boston, and newsletters of several universities. She is also working on her debut novel which is based in India and is about a way of life she experienced being born into a landowning family in a remote village of the southern Indian state of Karnataka. She says she saw things many people can “only read in books” in this village, which she visits every year with her family.

Sena Desai Gopal lives in Newton, a Boston suburb, with her husband and two young children, Surya and Anya.