Varun was born and brought up in India until coming to the US in 2011 to attend Bowdoin College. After getting a BA in physics he worked for 2 years in Vikaas Sohal's lab at UCSF, studying mouse models of schizophrenia and autism using optogenetics and in vivo calcium imaging. At Caltech, he hopes to combine wet lab experiments with more computational techniques to either dissect the neural systems that are responsible for our visual perception, or improve our understanding of disease related neural degeneration.