Aakanksha grew up in India and moved to the United States to pursue PhD at UT Southwestern Medical Center. She did her thesis work with Dr. Chandrashekhar Pasare, studying innate adaptive immune cross-talk and its role in autoimmune inflammation. She then moved to Dr. Clifford Woolf’s lab at Boston Children’s Hospital to understand how immune ligands regulate pain, a key symptom of many inflammatory diseases. Aakanksha started her lab at UW in July 2025 and she is excited to continue deciphering the neuroimmunology of