Meet Panchami Bhat, Email Marketing Lead

Panchami Bhat is a woman of many talents: knitting, writing, sewing, collaging, and getting into the nitty-gritty strategy that ensures every email from the Academy reaches the right audience, with the right message, at the right time.

Bhat’s deep love of learning is a throughline in everything she does, from regularly trying her hand at new hobbies to daily ventures into the aquarium to learn about our living collections. “One of the best parts of my job is that I get to work with almost everyone at the Academy. I support the sending of nearly 1,000 emails every year, which gives me the opportunity to learn about so many things—from Teen Science Night to NightLife, new animals to fascinating research. I love getting to work with such a wide array of teams and colleagues and getting a peek into what they do,” says Bhat.

Part of a “small but mighty team of two,” Bhat occupies a critical role building email content, managing campaigns, and driving analysis and strategy to optimize timing, audience, and messaging for email communications from nearly every department within the Academy. The work is a natural fit for Bhat, who draws on her education in consumer behavior and multifaceted marketing experience in her daily work, and channels her passion for social impact through her participation in the Marketing Exhibits Equity Working Group.

She is also not afraid to push herself outside her comfort zone. A South Bay native, she readily accepted the opportunity to finish the last two years of high school in India, and the experience helped widen her perspective and pursue college internationally. But she couldn’t deny the pull of her home state, and returned to the Bay after finishing college at Western University in Ontario.

Although she’s back in a familiar place, she continues to stretch herself, eagerly pursuing learning opportunities and new skills like painting with gouache and learning new languages (she knows Kannada, Tulu, Hindi, English, and French, and is working on learning ASL and Spanish).

"I am driven by a love of intelligence and beauty. Learning new crafts and languages encompasses both of those things,” says Bhat. “But I also think that’s what draws me to the Academy. Incredibly intelligent people are doing incredible things that maybe I’d never thought about before but can learn about in a lunchtime lecture. And there’s beauty all around the Academy. Getting to work in a museum and see the internal pieces, finding a new animal or fish I didn’t know existed–it encompasses what I want in my life, what I want to be part of, and what drew me here the most. It’s a really special place.”

Academy anniversary: July 26, 2021

Favorite Academy animal: “Spotted turtles—the little tiny ones next to Claude’s tank. If they’re reading this, I love all of them. I could stand there staring at them for hours.”

Favorite part of your job: Getting to work with all of the departments.

First job: Summer camp counselor for pre-k and kindergarten-aged kids.

Book recommendation: “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin. “It’s the most beautiful book I’ve read so far.”

Favorite place to get food in SF: Panchita’s Pupuseria “I get the jalapeno pupusa and whatever agua fresca they have—the passion fruit one is great.”

Suprising fact about you: “I took a glass-blowing class and made a blue spotted flower vase.”

Jeanette Peach is associate director of communications.