Mallica’s main interest is in cell and tissue biology. She studied Life Sciences and Biochemistry during her undergraduate degree at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. Here she began to develop an interest in animal development and joined the Molecular Biosciences master’s programme at Heidelberg Univeristy, Germany, majoring in Developmental and Stem Cell Biology. During this time, she conducted her master’s thesis project in EMBL Barcelona supervised by Dr. Vikas Trivedi, where she studied the formation of the anterior-posterior axis in self-organising fish embryonic cells.

To further pursue her studies in tissue biology, she joined the four year integrated MRes and PhD programme at Center for Doctoral Training (CDT) Biodesign Engineering. The first year consisted of an MRes in Systems and Synthetic Biology. She conducted her MRes research project in Guillaume’s lab which continued into her PhD. She is studying how to engineer and control tissue shapes in mammalian cell lines using optogenetics.

Reach out to her via email mallica.pandya@ucl.ac.uk or @PandaMalli on Twitter!