Suvi Anwar: Science Officer of the Tempest

Dr. Suvi Anwar was a member of the Nexus science team and the resident science officer of the scout ship Tempest during the Andromeda Initiative's settlement of the Heleus Cluster. Holding advanced degrees in astrophysics and molecular biology, she had spent her life seeking to reconcile two sides of herself, for she was at once a woman of science and a woman of faith.

Background#

Suvi came from a large and, by her own account, rather boisterous family of five children. Her neuroscientist mother and mathematician father exposed her and her siblings to science from a young age, which sparked a lifelong love of the subject. When she learned of the Andromeda Initiative, she signed up without hesitation, driven by a desire to see and experience more than one small corner of the vast universe.

She was noted above all for her strong religious beliefs, something that frequently drew the scorn of her more conventional colleagues over the course of her career. She believed that a divine intelligence lay behind all creation, akin to a deist clockmaker god, and held that her work as a scientist served to uncover that underlying plan. For her, no contradiction existed between being a woman of science and a woman of faith.

Service in the Heleus Cluster#

Suvi came to Andromeda as one of the colonists aboard the Nexus and was awoken from cryostasis shortly after the Nexus Uprising to replace an exiled member of the Nexus science team. In the dark days following the Uprising her opportunities for research were painfully limited, her efforts spent mostly on projecting the sustainability of the station's dwindling food supplies and determining which of the active colonists were to be considered most essential, work she did not look back on fondly. With the arrival of the ark Hyperion, she was assigned to the Tempest as its science officer.

Aboard the Tempest she took her place on the bridge alongside the salarian helmsman Kallo Jath, the two of them often sharing assessments and observations whenever the ship reached a new system in the Heleus Cluster. She operated the vessel's primary sensor array and its probe bay, alerting the Pathfinder to any anomalies that demanded investigation, and she remained in constant contact with her colleagues aboard the Nexus, forwarding the discoveries made in the field for further study. Her fascination with the unfamiliar geology and life of the new galaxy ran deep; she once performed a geological "lick test" on a Heleus rock while distracted and inflamed the inside of her mouth, a hazard she took in stride.

Study of the kett#

As both an astrophysicist and a molecular biologist, Suvi took a keen interest in the kett, whose genetics she found bizarre, horrifying, and fascinating all at once. After learning the truth of exaltation, the process by which the kett rewrote other species into their own image, she resolved to study what she could of it, even as she reasoned that the kett were likely studying the Initiative's species in turn. She consulted with the Tempest's physician, Dr. Lexi T'Perro, and weighed the prospect that they would eventually need to eat the local life of Andromeda if they meant to make their home there, testing samples for toxicity before doing so. In the aftermath of the conflict in the cluster she remained eager to explore the inner workings of the worlds they had reclaimed and to continue the research that had drawn her across dark space.