Why am I doing this?

Because I love interesting and intriguing things.

I am asked this question many times, in various groups, " You are an engineer, how come you ended up among a group of biologists? What brought you here?" These questions I answer again and again in different meetings and new places I visit. Especially to my family, it was a surprise because they knew how much I loathed biology as a kid. To me, at that stage, biology was only about learning difficult unpronounceable words. Interestingly, few people realize that (even among science people!), when we talk about pure fundamental science, the boundary of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering merge, and expertise in all the dimensions is needed to drill to the core of a problem. I wanted to be involved in something unconventional, something that results in discovering the unknown! Something challenging enough! While conventional engineering is highly important for pushing technology forward, it rarely involves the true pleasure of discovering something for the first time. Imagine being the only one in the world who knows something, being the only one on the planet to find out how something works. This pleasure of fundamental science discovery brought me to biology. As I read biology articles (mainly around the Brain-computer interface and so) in my leisure time from TCS, I realized biology is full of systems and problems, too difficult to be answered intuitively. These problems require a complex analytical and mathematical understanding of the system. Hence, I chose Biophysics for my Ph.D. research! The application of my research is very much applicable and relevant for industry and technological advancement. I learned the skill of taking up a highly complex problem (that is not even from my field of expertise) and then dissecting it into parts, brainstorming on it with experts from the field, and then coming up with a solution (through mathematical/computational modeling). Finally, presenting the solutions to the experts so they can understand, comment, and help improve. I realize working in a field alien to me and coming out on the other end triumphing is a phenomenal learning experience. As I finish my Ph.D., my interest is more in applying the skills learned to industry, technology, and businesses.

Ok! But why Fruit FLy?

Because its an amazing model organism.

Now, you may ask, what is a model organism? Well, a model organism is an organism that provides a system to do experimentation. Simply put, fruit fly, or what we call it, Drosophila Melanogaster, is an organism that can be raised in the lab in a controlled way, its genetics is well known, so we can create a variety of mutants (fruit-fly X-men!), its life cycle is small enough, so we can see its development again and again and study it. On top of all these advantages, its embryo is transparent!! So we can peep inside and see it develop!