I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
Our lab seeks to understand how the nervous system is organized, from the molecular identities of its neurons to the physics of the membranes that allow them to signal. We ask how neuronal diversity arises through development and evolution, how the spatial arrangement of cell types shapes resilience and vulnerability in disease, and how electrical activity emerges from the collective behavior of ion channels and membranes.
These questions cross disciplinary boundaries. We are primarily a theory and computation group, combining genomics and statistical inference with frameworks grounded in continuum physics and statistical mechanics. We work closely with experimental laboratories, and pursue targeted experiments of our own when needed.
We like to start from simple, sharp questions. When does a neuron’s identity become fixed? How ancient are the cells that let us see? What happens, physically, when a single ion channel opens? We reason from first principles, then test our ideas hard against data and against colleagues who know a field better than we do. Biology teaches us to respect complexity; physics teaches us that even extreme simplifications can yield deep insight. We try to let these instincts challenge each other.
Our current efforts focus on three areas, described on our research page:
- Neurogenomics of development and evolution
- Spatial biology of degeneration and aging
- Microscopic bioelectricity, in very close collaboration with Prof. Kranthi Mandadapu
If you are interested in joining the group, please click here.
Biography
I grew up in Mumbai, India, and studied chemical engineering at IIT Bombay. I received my PhD in chemical engineering from MIT, working with Prof. Arup Chakraborty on the statistical physics of viral evolution and immune diversity. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard with Prof. Aviv Regev, I turned to neuroscience, using single-cell genomics to build cell atlases of the retina. There I began a long and productive collaboration with Prof. Joshua Sanes. I joined the Berkeley faculty in 2020.