Natalia Ryder-Singh

Natalia is the genius twin sister to Anthony Ryder, younger sibling set to Nicholas and Jenny Ryder. Naturally gifted and a natural redhead like her mother, Natalia was something of a 'daddy's girl' in that she spent a lot of time with her father, who was typically very busy with security matters, which gave her plenty of time to develop her social skills and learn how to take things apart. While her twin brother was more interested in creating, she liked to improve on existing designs.

At 12 managed to create a new type of nanobot that can change a person's hair color at will, by releasing a temporary chemical change into the hair follicles that could change at will or remain a set color for as long as someone wanted. It garnered her a patent and a royalty payment that actually paid for her MIT education, even though she preferred to study at a variety of schools.

As a teenager, Natalia was a bit of a 'goofy' kid, she was attractive when she wanted to be, but she was usually too focused on her experiments and her school work to really put in effort. So her high school years were rather lonely, it wasn't until college that she came into her own.

Gaining a reputation as a genius that could pretty much do it all, chemistry, biochem, nano tech, electrical engineering, robotics, she started to get a bad rap as a 'Jill of all trades, master of none', even though everything she attempted worked and she grasped the key concepts. It wasn't until her final classroom year, that she discovered that she liked to educate and explain engineering concepts. So she and some of her classmates developed a show for the LCARSComNet's Science Channel called, at first, 'Red's Guide to Science' then 'Science for Nuts' and later 'Natalia the Science Chick' - as she had become a character in her own right on camera, being a bit more bubbly and artistic.

Background -

Natasha was born during a trip to Poland to visit some of the family relations living there. She and her twin brother Tony were born only seconds apart due to a complication in which their cords wrapped around each other, Tony's foot made it out first, but her head came out first. They like to tease each other over who's truly the oldest of the bunch.

A born prodigy, Natasha was playing piano at age three and violin by the time she was six years old. As the second set of twins in the family, she got particularly close to her brother and was nearly inseparable from him until they were 12 years old. When both got into school and started making more friends. While Tony has always been more of an engineer/tinkerer, Natasha was more introspective and wanted to know not just how things worked but why. Excelling at chemistry and physics, Natasha balanced her love of the sciences with a deep religious faith. As she knew that while science could and has explained many things, she still couldn't discount 'the first cause in a clearly intelligent design'.

As she got older and more attractive, she used that to her advantage, using her looks to get her private time with other scientists and engineers to learn more about their methods and experiments. When she graduated high school, she had ten colleges vying for her application, but she instead chose Marquette University due to its proximity to a Great Lake and the fact that at the time, a descendant of the Montgomery Scott family was teaching there and its Science and Engineering departments got a huge boost. Plus - she liked that it was close to the family home which she eventually bought with the proceeds from her first patent, a new kind of nanobot (which she dubbed a 'Nat-o-bot') that would color a person's hair with a simple shake of their head and a padd linked to a 'master' bot.

After finishing her under-grad studies, her twin brother convinced her to join him at MIT, and so she did. Working through to her doctorate and eventually finishing as the valedictorian of her class. Again Tony teased her, that it was because of her looks that she was chosen to be the valedictorian. Which she would counter with, "Aww you think I'm pretty that's so sweet... and true.", since her class was made up primarily of men and only three other females, a Bolian and a Benzite.

Eventually she took on the role of Chief Science Officer within the company Tony and Nick formed, AlphaTek an advanced technology firm. She helped develop some of the chemical compounds used in their weapons and propulsion technology. Including a thin, yet durable chemical mesh webbing that forms the basis of the under-armor for all AlphaTek armor systems.

When she was just finishing up her second doctorate, she was tapped to be the host of a Science and Technology show as "Natalia the Science Chick" - where she would present state of the art technology and theories to high school and college students. After her divorce, a marriage that lasted 10 years, she was flattered that people still found her attractive enough, especially in her fifties, that she developed quite a following. For the past decade she's done the show all around the quadrant and once Terra Alpha was in full swing she relocated to get a first hand account of what was all going on.

And more than a little jealous that her twin brother shaved about 25 years off his life thanks to some kind of regression - a process she's keenly interested in studying. But once her big brother Nick became President and made Tony his Secretary of Defense, Natalia was given the 'keys to the Kingdom' as it were and made CEO of AlphaTek Systems - later AlphaTek Industries once she merged with Frost Industries after its founder, ad a friend of Natalia's, was killed. AlphaTek Industries became the Quadrant's leading supplier of Synthetic Dilithium Crystals and computer hardware.

Natalia eventually found love again in an unlikely source - Khan Noonian Singh, from an alternate reality and the father of Selene Cross. It didn't take long for their mutual love of science to bring them together and they had recently conceived a daughter

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