In Profile:
Arindam Bhattacharya and Carolina Lavanderos
Heriot-Watt University alumnus Arindam Bhattacharya and his wife Carolina Lavanderos have recently decided to launch the Bhattacharya Lavanderos Scholarship, which from September 2025 will support a female Heriot-Watt student from a refugee or asylum seeker background. We sat down with them to learn more.
Hi Carolina and Arindam, please introduce yourselves.
Carolina: My name is Carolina Lavanderos. I was born in Chile and grew up in Venezuela, where I studied electrical engineering at the Universidad Simon Bolivar. We now live in Houston, Texas, and I have a small business of natural skincare products and personal care products made from sustainably farmed animal fats.
Arindam: She's very modest—she is also a functional nutritional therapy coach, and a budding entrepreneur!
As for me, I was born in India, grew up for a few years in London, went back to India, completed school and studied electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur before immediately joining Schlumberger (now SLB), which I’ve worked for now for the last 30 years. I first joined back in 1995 in Venezuela, which is where Carolina and I met and got married. I’ve worked many roles at SLB but now manage the venture investments portfolio.
Arindam, you started as a field engineer at SLB and now, 30 years later, you're the managing director. How has the sector changed over that period?
Arindam: It's been interesting being part of the energy industry for 30 years because energy is very closely connected to everything that happens around the world: economics, politics, international relations, etc. You’re really plugged into the world when you're part of the energy industry.
We have seen the nature of the energy mix, extraction processes, and geographic relationships change. Over the past few years there’s been an increased focus on new forms of energy, emissions and the decarbonization of industrial sectors, while increased conflict has raised anxiety about energy security and availability. The foci now are energy security, affordability, and sustainability.
I'm very proud of being part of this industry because, at the end of the day, we've been closely involved in the process of driving down the cost of and increasing access to energy through technology and thereby improving lives. Now, has it always happened in an equitable and environmentally sustainable way? Well, I think the whole industry is getting better at that, and it's important to work together towards that end.
Carolina, you originally graduated in electrical engineering from the Universidad Simon Bolivar in Venezuela, but now you work in wellness, nutrition, and regenerative farming. What motivated the shift in direction?
Carolina: When we moved to Houston, some health issues led me to enroll on a course at the Nutritional Therapy Association. One module, which was about food production, sparked a huge curiosity about farming in me. When I was a kid, my uncle had a farm and whenever we visited family in Chile we would stay there. I loved it but never suspected that it was really my calling!
I began digging into all kinds of questions: how can I produce nutrient-dense food? What is the impact of our food system on soil health? What happens to soil when you have grazing animals? And then I discovered the Savory Institute, a Colorado NGO whose core methodology, Holistic Management, is about long-term decision making in order to regenerate grasslands. It's really fascinating.
So I did a course with the Institute and, this year in 2025, we purchased some land in Chile and are currently working with a topographer to develop a regenerative farm based on holistic land management with rotational grazing.
“We don't want to lose touch with what our parents and grandparents went through and know that a lot of people are going through the same thing today."
Arindam, you graduated from Heriot-Watt with a master's degree in Petroleum Engineering and Project Management back in 2003. How was your time here and how do you think your degree helped your career?
Arindam: That one year in Edinburgh was fantastic! We had a group of thirteen of us from SLB doing the programme. I loved living campus life again—I would cycle to the Riccarton campus, have a pint during lunch, play football in the evening—it was lots of fun. And then, from a family perspective, our son, Daniel, was born there. We found it was an amazingly child-friendly city.
In terms of the impact on my career, I went from being focused on the limits of my immediate job to really understanding the macro nature of the industry, especially thanks to modules like Reservoir Engineering and Petroleum Economics. I went from doing roles in one specific area to becoming kind of horizontal across the company in the sense that I could suddenly do jobs that spanned and connected different areas. It was really helpful in terms of switching my career into a much broader mode.
Why launch a scholarship in support of an asylum seeker or refugee at Heriot-Watt?
Arindam: One interesting thing about us is that both of our families were, at one point, refugees. My father came from Bangladesh after the Partition of India in 1947—at just 15 years old he had to leave everything and come to Calcutta and build a new life to support his family.
Carolina: Yes, and my grandparents were taken as political prisoners during the Pinochet regime in Chile (1973–1990). My father moved to Venezuela for work and, a few months after, my mum, brother, and I went to join him.
When my grandparents were finally released from prison, they came as exiles to join us. We lived there for many years but, when Pinochet’s regime finally ended, they returned to Chile—their dream was always to return home.
Arindam: We don't want to lose touch with what our parents and grandparents went through and know that a lot of people are going through the same thing today. We want in our small way to help, even by supporting just one person. We thought that helping a female student in particular was important due to the extra struggles women can face; we really wanted to help people who have the odds stacked against them.
Carolina: We hope that the little bit that we can contribute will help set our supported student on the right path.
Thanks Arindam and Carolina!
To learn more about philanthropy at Heriot-Watt, please contact Senior Development Executive Andrew Mackinnon at a.mackinnon@hw.ac.uk.
