She developed a great interest in Science and later went ahead to earn her BSc and MSc from Osmania University, Hyderabad.
In 1972 she joined the Molecular Biophysics Unit, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore for her doctoral degree.
She got an opportunity to work under the guidance of biophysicist G. N. Ramachandran, on the theoretical modeling of the triple helical structure of the fibrous protein collagen.
Thereafter, she continued working at IISc as a post-doctoral fellow on left handed and other unusual structures of DNA till 1981.
She then went to Germany as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, for a year and worked on the structure of filamentous phages.