I grew up in a small town in India. Now I live in the Bay Area. Most of what I've done in life started with a question I couldn't stop thinking about. I spent most of my life working on scientific questions from brain research to delivery systems. I have directed and am a board member in K-10 schools in India. I now spend time working on building products that impact human life in a meaningful way including making people ask curious questions.
We asked a small group of kids what they are interested in. We gave kids resources, a clear goal based on their interests, and let them follow their own curiosity. For example, a 4th grade kid was interested in cars and video games. So the goal for the kid would be to create a car video game. Within a short period of time, kids had built robots, games, storybooks, and apps—without prior experience. Further, they were really motivated to achieve their goal.
Science is slow because of experiments. I initially spent a bunch of time trying to automate experimental research. But scientists spend too much time organizing and managing data. This delayed getting insights faster. So we built an AI-powered data platform to help scientists work faster all the way from experimentation to analysis.
Insulin remains unaffordable for many despite being a century-old discovery. I sketched out an idea for a funding structure called "Insulin DAO" to manufacture and distribute insulin through a public-owned system.
During COVID, something shifted. I wanted to work on problems that could be directly useful. I looked at different fields and found that gene therapy was a game changer in terms of impact. In gene therapy, delivery is the bottleneck specifically, how to get genes into the right cells without triggering an immune response. I started exploring whether we can reprogram ancient viral elements that already exist in our bodies (so no immune response) to deliver gene editors safely and specifically. I worked on RNA sensing systems to enable specificity. or the most simplest question - can we use a tiny injection to inject proteins into individual cells? Apparently, there are tiny injectors in the nature.
After watching a David Attenborough documentary on wildebeests, I wanted to understand what drives long-term motivation. I studied activity of dopamine neurons and hierarchical reinforcement learning to understand what drives learning and long-horizon behavior.
I tried to answer this by looking into the brain with a tiny microscope. I built fiber photometry systems, microscopes, and behavioral paradigms. This research was published in Science.
In college, I was reading V.S. Ramachandran, Oliver Sacks, and books on eusocial insects. I started wondering how internal states like hunger or anxiety affect brain activity. I studied that in zebrafish and found neurons that shift their activity depending on how hungry the animal is.