From a young age, Jayati loved science and maths, and she was always reading about new discoveries and inventions. One person she read about and admired was Dr Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, a famous Indian businesswoman who built one of the country’s biggest biotechnology companies. Jayati found her story so inspiring that, years later, she actually got the chance to meet and learn from her.
Jayati studied Molecular Biology at university in the United States, spending her summers doing research in laboratories around the world - from London to Boston to Bangalore. She later completed a PhD at the University of Oxford, where she researched ways to detect cancer cells in the body using special tiny particles.
“The things you study - even if they don’t lead exactly where you first imagined - can combine in surprising and powerful ways.”
Finishing her PhD at just 24 years old was an incredible achievement - but Jayati then discovered there weren’t many jobs in her field back home in India. Rather than seeing this as a dead end, she used it as a chance to learn something completely new: technology and business. She joined a company working on artificial intelligence, where her science background turned out to be the perfect match for helping create AI tools used by hospitals and healthcare companies around the world.
Today, Jayati is the Executive Director of Fluid AI, where her team builds AI products used by major companies worldwide, including in healthcare. She also still finds time to support new biotech businesses just starting out.