I did my undergraduate degree in engineering in Biotechnology at Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati in India.
For my doctoral work, I joined Prof. Mukund Thattai at National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), India to understand the billion-year-old origins of eukaryotic intracellular compartments. Here, I discovered the role of gene duplications and hybridization in this key evolutionary transition.
Diving deeper, I joined Prof. Michael Desai at Harvard to understand the effect of mutation rate on the dynamics and outcome of evolutionary processes. During this time, I read a phenomenal paper visualizing the transcriptional activity of key morphogens as the stripes were formed during drosophila development. This marked a turning point for me igniting my interest in transcriptional regulation and developmental biology.
Thus, I shifted my research focus and joined Vastenhouw lab as a postdoc. Here, I am working to understand the relationship between spatial organization of genes and their activity using live imaging techniques in early zebrafish embryos.