Vikas is a group leader at EMBL Barcelona focussing on tissue biology and disease modelling with a joint appointment at the Developmental Biology Unit at EMBL Heidelberg. Vikas started as an undergraduate at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He then went on to do a PhD at Caltech in Pasadena, USA where he worked on a wide range of in vivo imaging and analysis techniques including 2-photon light sheet microscopy for cardiac imaging, multiplexed quantitative in situ techniques. He had a brief postdoctoral stint at the University of Cambridge as a Herchel Smith Fellow and Sir John Henry Coates Fellow at Emmanuel College. There he worked on understanding the mechano-chemical coupling between cells that drives morphogenesis in aggregates of mouse embryonic stem cells. Vikas serves as the scientific editor at the Royal Microscopical Society. His long-term research interests are in using a combination of experiments, theory and computation to understand fundamental principles in morphogenesis.