Originally from India, Ambika came to the United States for higher education. She joined U of I, Urbana-Champaign (Go Illini!) in 2011 for grad school in chemistry. At UIUC, Ambika fell in love with the nice-ness of Midwest and amazing-ness of metalloenzymes. She spent the next five years designing metalloenzyme-based catalysts and characterizing their reaction mechanisms using a range of spectroscopy. Ambika, then, moved to the University of California, San Francisco to pursue a postdoctoral research stint focusing on drug discovery and high throughput screening. While the research was great, and weather was nice, Ambika realized she missed midwest too much and started her independent position at UMN (Go Gophers!) in 2018.
Ambika enjoys discussing science/ religion/ politics/everything under the sun with her husband, playing peek-a-boo with her one-year old daughter and video chatting with her family in India. Her other interests include hiking, biking and cooking.
