About Me

About

I joined Colorado State University in 2009.
Prior to this I was a postdoc at MIT in the Computational Immunology Laboratory of Prof Arup Chakraborty.I did my PhD in theoretical soft matter physics from Brandeis University, Waltham with Prof Jane’ Kondev in 2006.

I came to Brandeis in 2001 after almost 14 years teaching economics in SGTB Khalsa (Eve) College in the University of Delhi. I was fulfilling a childhood dream of becoming a physicist that had got postponed! As it turned out, I ended up in the physics-biology-engineering interface.

My big leap from teaching economics in an undergraduate college to graduate school in physics was helped by many people who spend time and effort writing about physics on the web for a popular audience. Thank you, all of you! I must single out John Baez whose writings I read avidly.

My research is driven by concrete biological and bio-engineering questions that I would like to help solve. However the larger questions posed by systems biology and quantitative biology fascinate and drive me too. What does it mean to say that life is an emergent property of complex biological networks? Are there non-trivial universal principles that “living matter” obeys? I think that we will be able to tackle these questions once we begin to develop predictive biological models, which is what I am ultimately trying to contribute towards.

I also have a deep interest in economics, history and politics especially of India. I am especially interested in human rights and the politics of the development process in India.

random talks

The Geometry of Phenotypes 2022 A talk on cell morphology.
BppB Seminar Series

Mechanical Spectroscopy of Cells 2018
Banff International Research Station
Banff, Canada