About
Rahul Rao is a former intern and contributing science writer for Popular Science since early 2021. He covers physics, space, technology, and their intersections with each other and everything else.
Experience
Rahul Rao has been a freelance science writer since 2019, and is currently writing regular physical science articles for Popular Science. Past and present, he’s written for Gizmodo, Physics Today, IEEE Spectrum, and Space.com. He has also been a US National Science Foundation Physics Journalism Fellow. In addition to his own background in astrophysics, he covers a wide range of fields—from infrastructure to research policy, from clean energy to theoretical physics, from archaeology to the future of space travel—all of which, he believes, can cross borders and help make a better world. He’s especially interested in showing how seemingly disparate things—medicine and frog eggs, for instance, or ocean waves and clean energy, or hydropower and decomposing plants—can actually be quite connected.
Education
Rahul holds a masters degree from New York University’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP). Prior to that, he completed his bachelors at Vanderbilt University, where he studied physics and English, interned at a national lab, simulated the gravitational waves from black hole clusters, and wrote about space for the university newspaper.
