I am a Sri Lankan native with a passionate interest in understanding how cell fate and function is intricately coordinated during organogenesis. I completed my BA in biology and international relations at Smith College in Northampton, MA, where I became fascinated by stem cell biology and embryonic development. I was then a research assistant at Boston Children’s Hospital in the Lab of Dr. George Daley where I contributed to projects focused on understanding the role of the Lin28/let-7 axis in embryogenesis, postnatal development, tumorigenesis and regeneration. I completed my doctoral studies at the University of California, San Francisco and the Gladstone Institutes in Dr. Deepak Srivastava’s lab. My graduate work focused on mapping the transcriptional dynamics of early mouse cardiogenesis at single-cell resolution and dissecting how loss of a single transcription factor called Hand2 leads to cell-type-specific perturbations, resulting in a heart malformation. I am really excited to be back at Boston Children’s Hospital in the collaborative and fun lab of Dr. Beth Stevens, where I am studying microglial state dynamics and function in neurodevelopment and neurological disease.