Gayatri Shankar Chilambi grew up in Chennai, India, where she received her B. Tech Biotechnology degree from Rajalakshmi Engineering College, Anna University – Chennai. After a brief stint in the tech sector, she went on to pursue her PhD in 2018 at Singapore Centre for Environmental life science Engineering, Nanyang Technological University on the mechanism of resistance to conjugated oligoelectrolytes in Enterococcus faecalis. She was initially trained as a postdoc in the lab of Dr. Daria Van Tyne at Division of Infectious Diseases and the Center for Innovative Antimicrobial Therapy at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Medicine. Here, she studied how enterococci evolved to become superbugs, using comparative genomics and functional genomic analysis. Gayatri joined Rutgers NJMS in September 2021. She is currently involved in performing analytical analysis and troubleshooting innovative TB diagnostic assays as a part of the FEND diagnostics program.