I come from Tamilnadu, India. My home is just three hundred kms from the southernmost tip of India. I lived in several parts of India and experienced different culture, food and language.

From 2009, I joined Dual Degree programme (B.Tech and M.Tech) in Biotechnology at Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Biology was not my favourite subject during my school days, still I chose to purse biotechnology during my undergraduate without much thinking. It was during my college that I became interested in biology. My undergraduate was a mixture of molecular biology and chemical engineering. Molecular biology was very different from classical biology that I studied in school. School biology was largely filled with boring stuff like anatomy and taxonomy.

During the first year of my undergraduate I was reading the popular biology textbook by Campbell and Reece. It was my first encounter with modern biology. In that book, I read about an experiment using fluorescent bleaching to show that during cell division microtubules don’t pull chromosomes but the chromosome walk on the microtubules. This was the first time I felt captivated towards biology. Later I came across many other such innovative experiments like the Meselson and Stahl’s experiment that proved that DNA replication is semiconservative, Hershey-Chase experiment and several others. The way in which biology was taught in my undergraduate was very different from the way in which I learnt biology in school. School biology was mostly descriptive but my college biology was novel and thought provoking. Besides, to me, molecular and cell biology were more interesting than classical biology. So I felt attracted towards molecular biology and decided to pursue a scientific career in molecular biology.

During my undergraduate, I worked in the laboratory of Dr. R. Baskar in the summer of 2011. Later I continued my final year project in the same lab. My goal was to make a knockout of rbbD gene in dictyostelium. But at the end I could not make a knockout. I was disappointed. But there is no research without failures.

During my undergraduate I did two internships. In the summer of 2012 I did an internship at Orchid Pharmaceuticals in India. In 2013 I applied for NIGINTERN internship program and I was lucky to be selected for a two month internship in Saga Lab, here at NIG. I studied germ cell development in mouse. It was the first time for me to use mouse for research. I learnt many new things like confocal microscopy, cell culture and various molecular biology techniques.

From October 2014 I joined NIG as an IGP student for a five year PhD program. Availability of advanced facilities and several experienced researchers makes NIG one of the finest places for graduate studies. I was also amazed by the spacious laboratories here. For my graduate studies I wanted to work in neuroscience, because I think it is the most mysterious field and lots of interesting things are happening here now. So I joined Iwasato lab. My present study is about understanding how the brain develops. Particularly I am interesting in understanding the effect of neural activity on neuronal development and circuit formation. I use many interesting techniques in my research. Some of them require artistic skills and this adds spice to my research. I hope my graduate training will give me the necessary skills and knowledge to tackle the future problems in neuroscience.