Top: Padma Venkatraman. Book cover photo courtesy of PENGUIN GROUP

Padma Venkatraman's science career has taken her to remote areas of India, on crocodile-counting expeditions and on cruises where she ordered around German researchers. Now her equally prolific writing career has taken her on a journey to the British-controlled India of the 1940s and back to her own family's history.

Venkatraman, an oceanographer by training, will publish her first novel, "Climbing the Stairs," under Penguin Group next month.

The book is about a young girl's struggle for independence growing up in a traditional and affluent Indian household during World War II. 

"The novel is largely based on my own family history, with a lot based on my mother's past," said Venkatraman, who has authored nearly 20 children's picture books.  For the book, she interviewed several Indians — including her own friends and family — who grew up during the eve of India's independence.

The Chennai native in her 30s, said her mother, who was formerly a lawyer in India, was a major inspiration for her — both in writing the novel and in real life.

"Hands down, the woman that I respect the most in the world is my mother, head and shoulders above any other woman. She's an extremely modest and wonderful human being," she said.

Calling herself a scientist by training and writer by choice, Venkatraman, a new mother herself, immigrated to the United States at 19 to pursue graduate school and has earned a doctorate in oceanography from the College of William and Mary and a Ph.D. in environmental engineering from John Hopkins University. She has worked with biologists in India to count and bag crocodiles and was the chief scientist aboard several scientific cruises at the Institut of Meereskunde in Kiel, Germany.

"I can't say that I didn't enjoy ordering large German men around," she joked about the experience.

But Venkatraman, a small-framed woman with a gentle demeanor, was often a minority in her field, both as a woman and a South Asian. As she advanced in math and science in high school, she soon noticed that boys dominated the classrooms. At one point, she was one of ten girls among 90 boys taking math, chemistry and physics courses, she said. The same happened in college, where women made up only about 20 percent of the students in her classes. Racial minorities were even rarer, she said.

Today, she is director of the University of Rhode Island's office of graduate diversity affairs and a part-time adjunct professor at URI's Graduate School of Oceanography. But despite pursuing a career in decidedly left-brain oriented disciplines, Venkatraman says fiction writing has always been her passion.

"I've always written," she said. "You are always a writer; whether you get published or not — that's secondary. In general, the Indian community tends to place a very high value on education, particularly math and science. When I was younger, I could see myself making money and taking care of myself in this profession, not as a writer."

"Climbing the Stairs," which follows Venkatraman's picture book for children, "The Forbidden Temple," published in 2004, is set to receive a Booklist magazine starred review in its current issue and a Book Sense "notable pick" in May. Venkatraman is currently touring bookstores in New England to promote the work. 

She is also already working on her next book, "Biographies of a Female Mathematician," slated for publication later this year. Set in contemporary India, the novel will feature a woman working as a researcher in a remote location in India, a woman much like Venkatraman.

Venkatraman is touring New England for "Climbing the Stairs" this May. Her book can be found at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. For more information about Venkatraman's tour or her books, visit her blog at padmasbooks.blogspot.com.