I was born in rural south India and came to North America as a small child, growing up in the state of Illinois, in the United States. I obtained my first degree in Biology at the University of Chicago, where I fell in love with research on the molecular underpinnings of how cells work.

Leaving the cold Chicago winters for sunny California, I earned my MD and PhD degrees from the University of California, San Francisco. This is where I first developed a lifelong interest in understanding the processes of protein maturation and protein quality control. After my degrees, I moved to the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where I ran a research group for eleven years.

In 2011, I joined the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology as a Programme Leader. Since 2019, I have been head of the Cell Biology Division. My group’s research has been recognised by several awards, including my election to the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) in 2013 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2016.

Each cell in our body had hundreds of millions of proteins, and these have to be replenished constantly as old and damaged proteins are recycled. In most cells, around a million or more new proteins are made every minute. We address two related questions concerning protein production. First, how do newly made proteins get to the right part of the cell and assemble into functional products? Second, how do cells recognise errors during protein maturation and target the defective products for degradation? Both processes are essential to all living cells, and even subtle problems in protein maturation or quality control lead to various diseases.

Our work on protein maturation focuses on membrane proteins, which are essential for sensing the environment, communication with other cells, and transport of nutrients and metabolites. We take a biochemical approach to identify and mechanistically dissect the factors involved in membrane protein folding, and assembly.

Our work on quality control focuses on proteins that fail to go to the correct part of the cell or fail to assemble into a multi-subunit complex. We call these mis-localised or unassembled proteins orphans. We are identifying and studying the quality control factors that recognise and eliminate orphans.