About

Shruthi is an electronics engineer turned award-winning Journalist with a passion for stories. She is a fact-checking trainer at the Google News Initiative India Training Network and is an alumnus of the US Government Exchange Program on Tech Governance. Currently, as the Program Lead and Opinion Editor at DataLEADS, she oversees projects on technology, climate change, and health. In the past, she has led programs for YouTube Health, WHO, and the Center for Investigative Journalism- London. In 2023, she led the communications for CTeC Asia, in Taiwan on the impact of Artificial Intelligence on communication and citizen participation across the globe. 

 

Over the last nine years, she has worked at the intersection of journalism, technology, and public policy. She has reported on socio-economic issues across 36 Indian states and three countries for leading Indian national dailies The Print, YourStory, The News Minute, The News Laundry, and HealthLEADS. ​

 

Shruthi is a graduate in Telecommunication Engineering from the BMS Institute of Technology, a public policy graduate from the Takshashila Institution, and holds certificates from the Oxford Climate Society (London), Azim Premji University(Bangalore) and Anil Agarwal Environment Training Institute (New Delhi). Her narratives employ policy instruments to examine issues and cover stories from a humanitarian lens. She brings her learnings of working on programs for global organizations such as Internews and OXFAM Netherlands in developmental matters to mobilize communities. She has dabbled as a science communicator for innovation hub C-CAMP with a focus on startups and innovation. As a Climate Change Media Fellow at TERI, she reported stories on Climate Change with a special focus on the Himalayan region. As part of this fellowship, Shruthi hosted a weekly radio show on Radio Bulbul, an internet radio station by TERI. The radio program highlighted climate change and other social issues of the region with native music and storytelling with an active audience from 15 countries. She was also a part of the winning team at the Tech and Governance Bootcamp 2020 led by the US Embassy and the Kathmandu Living Labs, Nepal. She also was one of the 25 researchers chosen by the Global Media Monitoring Project from India, which is the largest and longest-running research on gender in the world's news media.

A trained classical dancer and musician, Shruthi often engages as a scribe for the visually impaired and can speak sign language. In her free time, she records audiobooks for the visually impaired and participates in awareness programs for the differently-abled. As an artist, she believes in placing a humane lens on everything she indulges in.

She speaks English and four South Asian languages: Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, and Tamil, and is learning to communicate in sign language.