I didn't plan on a career in gene therapy. I started out fascinated by microbes that live in places most life can't handle.

For my Ph.D. at Sardar Patel University in India, I studied microbial communities in extreme environments. I wanted to know who was living there, what they were doing, and how they managed to cope with such harsh conditions. Along the way I found unusual community structures and some interesting stress-tolerance pathways. Mostly, though, I learned to see a genome as a story of how an organism has adapted.

When I moved into industry, the questions became more practical. I worked on AAV and lentiviral vectors, the engineered viruses used to deliver gene therapies, and my job was to make sure we could measure them properly. I developed and validated methods for genome quantification, potency, and purity testing. Making those assays more accurate helped our teams move faster, supported regulatory submissions, and kept us in line with GMP and ICH standards. It was satisfying work, because I knew good data mattered for the patients who would eventually receive these therapies.

I'm also a Reviewing Editor for Springer, and I review papers for journals like BMC Genomics, Scientific Reports, World Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology, Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, and Frontiers in Marine Science. I enjoy this side of my work. Helping shape what gets published keeps me curious and in touch with what others in the field are doing.

At heart, I'm a researcher for life. What ties everything together is a simple interest in understanding how living systems work and measuring them carefully. I've carried that from basic microbial research into viral vector therapeutics, and I'm still enjoying the mix of the two.