Ramya comes from India with training in both computational and experimental techniques. She did her undergraduate engineering degree in Biotechnology from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati, India. For her doctoral work, she joined Prof. Mukund Thattai at National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), India to understand the billion-year-old origins of eukaryotic intracellular compartments. She discovered the role of gene duplications and hybridization in this key evolutionary transition. Diving deeper, she joined Prof. Michael Desai at Harvard to understand the effect of mutation rate on the dynamics and outcome of evolutionary processes. Along the way, her interest was piqued to understand how cells find/activate stimuli-relevant genes within the compacted nuclear genome in a time-sensitive manner. She decided to take on this challenge and joined Nadine at MPI-CBG to address this. Apart from science, she loves nature walks, gardening and theatre.