Biography

Growing up on a steady diet of science fiction and popular science, I was certain by the time I was 17 that I wanted to pursue a career in research, and my journey which began under Dr. Anshu Bhardwaj's guidance at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), India, has been quite serendipitous since. In my second year as an undergraduate, I met Prof. Tom Blundell at a workshop on antimicrobial resistance in India that I had helped Dr. Bhardwaj organise, and in a Ramanujan-esque turn of events, Prof. Blundell generously arranged for my travel and stay in Cambridge as I spent the summer of 2017 working in his lab at the Department of Biochemistry. I was awarded the prestigious Gates Cambridge scholarship in 2018 to pursue an MPhil in Biological Science in Prof. Blundell’s lab, where I worked on enzyme targets in the arginine biosynthetic pathway of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, employing the fragment-based structure-guided approach for early-stage antitubercular drug discovery. Having gained some experience in X-ray crystallography, and with a keen interest in applying structural biology techniques to study bacterial sensing and transport mechanisms, I started my PhD with Dr. Jamie Blaza at the York Structural Biology Laboratory, Department of Chemistry, University of York, UK in January 2020, for which I secured a competitive YGRS Overseas Research Scholarship. The aim of my PhD is to investigate the molecular events that lead to germination of Bacillus spp. spores using high-resolution single particle cryo-electron microscopy; solving the structures of protein complexes (receptor and channel proteins) that are present in the inner membrane of spores and are known to be involved in the initiation of the germination cascade.

Previous Education

University of Delhi