[1] Neelima Sinha was born on March 26, 1954, in a small town near New Delhi, India.
She earned her masters in Botany from Lucknow University in 1975 after which she worked for nine years as a bank manager[2] before returning to academia, first moving to Waco, Texas in 1985 for a one year masters in environmental studies and then in 1986 entered the University of California, Berkeley, where she was the first student to join the lab of Sarah Hake, a maize geneticist at the Plant Gene Expression Center.
At Berkeley, Sinha studied the knotted1 gene in maize and tomato, earning her PhD in 1991.
[2] In 1995, Sinha was offered, and accepted, an assistant professor position in the Department of Plant Biology at University of California, Davis.
She continued her career at UC Davis, and is now a full professor in the Department of Plant Biology.