PRESENT:

I am currently a PhD student in Jukka Westermarck's Cancer Cell Signalling group at Turku Centre for Biotechnology. My focus would be "Therapeutic targeting of clinically challenging breast cancer subtypes (such as Basal type Triple Negative Breast Cancer BTBC and Therapy Resistant HER2+ cancers TRHER2+ )"

Volunteer Activities:

I am also an active member of BITSAA Boston Chapter (Alumni association of my undergrad school) and my role is to help in fund raising and organizing events that help in strengthening the ties among alumni so that they can help each other when in professional or personal need.

PAST:

I graduated with a BS (Hons.) in Pharmacy from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS)-Pilani India. and completed my MS Pharmaceutical Sciences from Northeastern University, Boston. I was driven towards the field of Oncology while working under the eminent guidance of Prof.Vladimir Torchilin during masters'

Even though I didn't have any prior experience in biotechnology, I was interested in this area and picked it up very quickly. I also got a chance to undertake a thesis project titled "Preparation of transferrin targeted NCL-240 (a novel cytotoxic drug) micelles and their evaluation using in vitro 3D cancer cell culture (spheroid) models".

After graduating from Northeastern I worked as a Research Associate for 2 years at an Oncology Drug Discovery company in Boston, USA where my role was to conduct combination high throughput screening of oncology pipeline molecules on a series of cancer cell lines and determine a better synergistic combination in comparison to standard of care.

As a part of my role, I also studied the cancer signaling pathways and the mechanism of action of several anti cancer drugs. This helped me recommend the class of drugs which might serve as potential synergistic combinations with standard of care.My work at Horizon and Northeastern rekindled my interest in the area of Cell Signaling. I was intrigued by how complex the cancer disease biology was and hence wanted to pursue a PhD in this area.