Akanksha Thawani is currently a Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellow in the labs of Dr. Eva Nogales and Dr. Kathleen Collins at UC Berkeley. She obtained her undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (India) and her Ph.D. from Princeton University working with Drs. Sabine Petry and Howard A Stone. She is interested in understanding how the mobile genome functions and how their activities are regulated.