Our research group at EMBL investigates fundamental principles of nuclear organisation and architecture, with a particular interest in how the nucleus evolved from an archaeal-bacterial symbiosis over 2 billion years ago.As a postdoc with Buzz Baum at the MRC Lab for Molecular Cell Biology at UCL, I pioneered a comparative approach to these questions, using one tractable model system with a nucleus (fission yeast) and one without (a close archaeal relative of eukaryotes, Sulfolobus). I received my PhD from Stanford University’s Department of Chemical and Systems Biology in 2015, where I worked with Tobias Meyer on the evolution of human gene regulatory modules. Before moving to California, I worked with Satyajit Mayor and Mukund Thattai at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, India, on genome-scale screens for endocytosis.