About

I received my bachelor's degree in Biotechnology Engineering from the University Institute of Engineering and Technology at Panjab University in Chandigarh, India. I then moved to the U.S. to pursue a master’s degree in Systems Biology and Bioinformatics at New York University. During this time, I worked in Dr. Lionel Christiaen's lab at the Center for Developmental Genetics, where I adapted the CRISPR-Cas9 system for use in the marine invertebrate Ciona intestinalis. I also applied machine learning to identify and predict the efficiency of all possible guide RNA sequences targeting the Ciona genome.

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I went on to pursue a Ph.D. in Developmental Biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Dr. Marianne Bronner’s research group. My thesis work took a systems-level approach to a long-standing question in neural crest biology: what gives neural crest cells their unique ability to form cardiovascular derivatives? I uncovered the gene regulatory circuitry that governs the acquisition of cardiac identity in the neural crest and used this information to reprogram other neural crest populations toward a cardiac-like fate. In parallel, I developed new tools for chick developmental biology to support these discoveries, including methods for genome engineering, retroviral lineage tracing, and single-cell transcriptomics.

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In 2021, I was selected as a Schmidt Science Fellow, which allowed me to spend a year as a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Hans Clevers’ lab at the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht, The Netherlands. There, I worked on developing base-editing tools to model hotspot cancer mutations in adult stem cell–derived organoids. Since 2022, I have been at the University of California, Berkeley, where I began as a Miller Research Fellow. I am currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology in Dr. Richard Harland’s lab, supported by a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). My research focuses on understanding how the heart septates during embryonic development and the roles different cardiac cell lineages play in this intricate process. I combine both in vivo and in vitro models to address these questions.