It was genuine interest, of course! Although the path that brought me there was relatively serendipitous. I’m a chemical engineer by training. I studied chemical engineering at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) in Pilani, India. One day, by chance, I attended a lecture on recombinant DNA technology and heard about cloning and transgenesis. That was the first insight I got into biotechnology, and it made me want to learn more. So I signed up for an elective course on immunology, and even did a short summer stay in a lab. I fell in love with the immune system. I felt like I had found my calling in life, so I pursued a Master’s in Biotechnology, also at BITS, and then I moved to Michael Reth’s lab at the Max Planck Institute for Immunology in Freiburg, Germany, to do my PhD. Michael liked my chemical engineering background. He wanted me to reconstitute human B cell antigen receptor (BCR) signaling in evolutionary distant Drosophila S2 cells to understand how this immune signaling was initiated and amplified. Early events in BCR signaling involve phosphorylation and domains within signaling proteins that bind to these phosphorylated residues. I was amazed by how this cascade of information transfer occurs in a crowded cellular environment. If you think about it, the mechanistic precision that exists to transmit the right message with accuracy is just wow! This was what first got me interested in working on signaling mechanisms.