I grew up in Hazaribagh, a small town in Jharkhand, India, and I came to chemistry through the ordinary route: it was the subject that kept being interesting after the exam was over. I finished a B.Sc. (Honours) in Chemistry at Acharya Narendra Dev College, University of Delhi, in 2016, and joined IISER Bhopal the following year for my master's in the group of Prof. Alakesh Bisai, where I worked on the total synthesis of pyrroloindoline alkaloids and learned what it costs to carry a molecule through a long route without losing it. I qualified CSIR-JRF and GATE during that period.

In 2021 I moved to Switzerland to do my PhD with Prof. Dmitry Katayev, first at the University of Fribourg and then at the University of Bern. I was his first student, which meant that before I ran a reaction I had to build the place to run it in, twice. Setting up two laboratories from empty rooms turned out to be the most useful thing that happened to me scientifically. When you have chosen the equipment, written the protocols, and fixed the instruments yourself, you stop treating a failed reaction as bad luck and start treating it as information about the system you built.

My doctoral work was on designing reagents that release fluorinated and nitrogen-centred radicals under visible light, and then following those radicals carefully enough to control where they go. That produced methods for gem-difluoro compounds, trifluoromethyl ketones, vicinal dihalides, and nitrative difunctionalisation, and along the way, a custom 350 W photoreactor, because the commercial options could not do what I needed at the scale I wanted.

I joined Prof. Shiyu Zhang's group at The Ohio State University in April 2025, and moved from photons to electrons. In May 2026 I was awarded an SNSF Postdoc.Mobility Fellowship, which now supports my work on ¹⁸F chemistry for PET imaging. Simultaneously, I am developing a new architecture for organic electrosynthesis that removes a constraint the field has treated as fixed for a century. It spans sixteen reaction classes, runs at gram scale, and enables multistep and parallel electrochemistry that solution-phase methods cannot. Manuscript in preparation.