Coming from an academic family, I grew up in Calcutta, a city in the eastern part of India, in a milieu of art films, left-wing politics, and football. I was an undergraduate at Presidency College where I studied Chemistry, Zoology and Physiology. I then pursued a Master's degree in Biochemistry (with a specialisation in Genomics and Proteomics) from University of Calcutta. During my M.Sc, I became interested in understanding how cellular signalling pathways encode spatio-temporal information. My quest for understanding signalling complexity brought me closer to Neuroscience, and this was fueled further by an annual British Council Lecture by Professor Colin Blakemore which I attended in Nandan, Calcutta. His talk on 'Vision and Neural Plasticity' totally blew me away and motivated me to plunge into Neuroscience.   

After finishing my M.Sc, I joined Professor Upi Bhalla's Computational Neuroscience lab at National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS-TIFR, Bangalore), spending several months studying mammalian olfaction using optical recording from rat olfactory epithelium. After a brief stint at NCBS, I joined the Neuronal Oscillations Group, Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics at University of Oxford for my D. Phil. with Professor Ole Paulsen as a Felix scholar. I studied properties of timing-dependent plasticity in mammalian barrel cortex as my D.Phil project. After finishing my D.Phil in April 2010, I stayed with Ole as a Research Associate in the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience at University of Cambridge for few months.

In August 2010, I moved to Boston and joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a Simons Fellow on Autism and Brain Development, to work with Professor Mriganka Sur where studying Visual Cortex Plasticity and Rett Syndrome.

Since September 2015, I am a Marie Curie fellow in the laboratory of Professor Fritjof Helmchen in the University of Zurich. Using deep in vivo imaging combined with novel genetic tools, my work here aims to elucidate the mechanisms underlying functional and structural plasticity of the adult hippocampus in health and disease.