Vaishnavi Ananthanarayanan graduated with a dual degree in Biological and Computer Science from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani, India. She then joined the laboratory of Iva Tolic at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, to work on the mechanisms underlying the activity of the cytoplasmic motor protein dynein. In 2014, she was granted the INSPIRE Faculty Fellowship by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), India and established her independent research group at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India. Three years later, she became an Assistant Professor at the Centre for BioSystems Science and Engineering and the Indian Institute of Science and an EMBO Young Investigator and Wellcome Trust/DBT – India Alliance Intermediate Fellow in 2019. Her research is focused on understanding dynein activation in living cells and the roles of microtubules in mitochondrial dynamics during neurodegeneration.

She recently became a member of Journal of Cell Science’s Editorial Advisory Board.