Q&A

摘要

How would you describe your early academic years? I grew up in a family of businesspeople and engineers in India, but I was not that inspired by my early pursuits in chemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. When I turned 18, I began to really think about what I wanted. I started reading author and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and got interested in molecular biology. My chemical-engineering adviser steered me to K. Krishnamurthy Rao, a professor at the institutes new department of biosciences and bioengineering. He changed the course of my career, teaching me during informal afternoon meetings because a timing conflict prevented me from sitting in on his class. Despite my not having done any formal coursework, those meetings helped me to write strong letters of application to graduate programmes in India and abroad.