Mallica comes from India, where she completed her BSc. Life Sciences and Biochemistry at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. She then pursued an MSc in Molecular Biosciences, with a major in Developmental and Stem Cell Biology at Heidelberg University, Germany. She conducted her master’s thesis at Dr. Vikas Trivedi’s lab at EMBL Barcelona, where she studied the development of the anterior- posterior axis in self-organising fish embryonic cells (pescoids). Following this, Mallica joined the 4 year integrated MRes and PhD program from CDT BioDesign Engineering at Imperial College London, where she completed her MRes in Systems and Synthetic Biology in the first year. 

Mallica is now pursuing a PhD in Cell and Developmental Biology, Division of Biosciences at UCL, supervised by Prof. Guillaume Charras. She is interested in tissue mechanics and engineering and studies how to control tissue shapes within mammalian cell lines using optogenetics.