Investigative journalist | Feature writer | Software engineer

Aneela Mirchandani was always interested in too many things to stick to a single career, so she chose to be a journalist. 

She took a circuitous route to get there. Arriving from India with a software engineering degree, she worked as a programmer for years. During that time she wrote for her own websites. Chasing obsessions, she wrote essays on food, examined the science of genetically-modified crops, and disentangled the knotty issues surrounding social meda, free speech, and disinformation. 

On the way she developed expertise in internet investigations (OSINT) and uncovered secretive owners of scam websites. One of her investigations uncovering a Romanian company that sold gold-plated Trump coins (sourced for pennies on AliExpress) was quoted in the New York Times. 

She went to graduate school to professionalize her reporting (New York University 2024), and emerged with new investigative skills: obtaining public records and digging into tax documents. Scoops resulted, with bylines in Salon, Daily Dot, and (upcoming) Mother Jones. 

Aneela also writes on issues affecting the Indian diaspora and the local Asian American community. Much of this reporting can be found in AsAmNews. 

A dogged researcher and avid reader, Aneela lives in San Francisco where she occasionally imagines she is in a Dashiell Hammett novel.