Dr. Vaishnavi Ananthanarayanan is an EMBL Australia Group Leader at Single Molecule Science, School of Medical Sciences.

She graduated with a Ph.D. in Biophysics from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany in 2014. Prior to this, Vaishnavi pursued a dual degree - M.Sc. Biological Sciences and B.E. Computer Science at BITS, Pilani, India. She started her independent group in 2014 at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore with her Dept. of Science and Technology (India) INSPIRE Faculty Award. She transitioned to an Assistant Professor position in the same institute in 2017. She was awarded the Dept. of Biotechnology (DBT, India) Innovative Young Biotechnologist Award in 2015, Science and Engineering Research Board (India) Early Career Research Award in 2016, and was elected Associate of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 2018. In 2019, she was inducted to the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) as a Young Investigator and was granted the Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance Intermediate Fellowship. Most recently, her work was recognised with the Indian National Science Academy’s Medal for Young Scientists 2020 and the American Society for Cell Biology (WICB) Junior Award for Excellence in Research 2021. In June 2020, she co-founded BiasWatchIndia, an initiative to document representation of women, and to combat gender-biased panels at Indian science conferences.