Profile

I studied Mechanical Engineering in my undergraduate, and I was especially interested in Aerospace. I was always interested in Rocket Science, and finally had the chance to be a part of the Academic Rocket Science Initiative, Switzerland. We built a reusable rocket capable of launching it to an altitude of 3kms.

I gradually transitioned towards Biology during my masters, where I combined my love for Aerospace, and was involved in a NASA funded project in the State University of New York, Stony Brook, USA, to prevent weakening of astronaut’s bones due to low gravity environment. In this project, I learnt how to prepare bone sample from pigs, in order to test its mechanical strength due to different therapeutic techniques.

In my PhD, I moved to Switzerland, and studied at ETH Zurich. There, I investigated how the carnivorous plant Venus flytrap responds to touch of a moving insect. The flytrap has tiny sensory hairs on its upper leaf surface, which are trigger electrical signals when the insect touches these hairs. The electrical signals, called Action Potentials travel across the leaf to indicate the plant to snap and close.

My primary research focuses on the simulation of cytoskeletal systems, with special emphasis on dynamics of filaments such as actin and microtubules. Microtubule behaviour plays a vital role in plant morphogenesis, and by understanding their processes, I hope to gain new insights into the cellular processes governing cell shape and tissue organization in the plant and animal kingdom. At the Sainsbury Lab, I am part of François Nédélec’s group, and we work on the development of an open-source cross-platform simulation tool called Cytosim, for the purpose of modelling a network of filaments connected by molecular motors.