Profile

I was born and brought up in India. I come from the same state where the “Taj Mahal” is! I came to United Kingdom to pursue and develop my scientific career. I live in a small village called Linton near Cambridge with my wife and my 4 year old son (who has just started his schooling this year). Other than science, I am very passionate about cricket, music and food.

Skin is the largest organ of our body. It provides us our first line defense against all sorts of environmental stresses like heat, infections, radiations, excessive water loss etc.

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Our skin is much more complex than how simple it looks from outside.

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We loose a lot of cells all the time from the outer surface of skin and this loss is replenished at the same time. This way we regenerate a completely new skin almost every two weeks. This phenomenon is successfully achieved mainly because of the stem cells, which are present in most of our tissues including skin, by virtue of their ability to divide and generate more cells to maintain the tissue where they reside.

The top layer of skin is called epidermis which is composed of multiple layers cells called keratinocytes (because they have abundant amount of protein called keratin). In this tissue the bottom most layer, called stratum basale (or basal layer), has the stock of stem cells which can divide and transform to replenish for the loss of cells from the topmost layer called stratum corneum (or corneum layer). Its a wonderful phenomenon which provides a great model system or tool to study and understand regeneration of our body’s tissues.

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I am trying to recapitulate this phenomenon in my lab and break open our skin cells to study the different changes they go through to establish and maintain the architecture of our skin. This is a simple and elegant way to investigate and identify what goes wrong in a disease condition like cancer.

I am an early bird. I wake up at 5 am, catch 6.25 am train to London to go to my lab. I enjoy my 1 hour quiet train journey where I can read and plan my whole day at work. As soon as I reach work, I love to look at the cells which I am growing in my lab to give them a good morning smile and check under the microscope if they are doing well. Rest of the day is mixed with doing experiments, discussing new questions with other scientist, mentoring students and of course a few essential coffee breaks.

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In the evening back at home I play with my son and read stories to him.