Research

In the Tjian–Darzacq Lab at UC Berkeley, I study the kinetics of transcription factor cooperativity. I use single-molecule tracking to watch how TFs move, bind, and interact in live mammalian cells. I build Markov-state models to infer binding and dimerization rates directly from imaging data, and I'm developing a single-molecule footprinting assay to disentangle two things that look similar from the outside but aren't — thermodynamic binding cooperativity and downstream functional synergy between transcription factors.

Before Berkeley, I worked across several labs at IIT Madras and, briefly, UC Berkeley, moving between wet-lab and computational projects. In Athi Naganathan's Protein Biophysics Lab, I used a statistical mechanical framework to derive the folding free-energy landscapes of G protein-coupled receptors. In Karthik Raman's Systems Biology Lab, I built agent-based cellular automaton models of microbial consortia growing on 2D surfaces, coupled to flux-balance analysis for strain design. During a stint in Hernan Garcia's lab at Berkeley, I modeled the zebrafish segmentation clock, inferring biochemical parameters from live-imaging traces of MS2-tagged clock genes. Alongside this, I spent two years in synthetic biology through iGEM, first as a team member and later as team leader, engineering microbial strains for small-molecule production and building genetic toolkits for non-model microbes.