[1] She has also received the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award and been named a Pew-Stewart Scholar and a New York Stem Cell Foundation Robertson Investigator.

[3] Whilst a high school student, Naik came across the story of Dr. Bonnie Bassler, a biologist at Princeton University, who was working on quorum sensing mechanisms that make bacteria glow.

[3] After graduating, Naik was appointed to the Naval Medical Research Center, where she looked at immune responses to traumatic brain injury.

[10] She found that indigenous microbes co-opt tissue-specific modes of interacting with the host to direct immune cell function in the skin.

[12] Naik continues this work to understand how all the different cell types in a complex tissue may experience and remember inflammation and if such memories can be manipulated to promote health.

These findings have profound implications for cellular adaptation in a range of damage-associated diseases, including non-healing wounds, cancers, and inflammatory conditions.

Naik has spoken on not only her goals as a scientist (“discovery and bettering human health”), but also as a person to make science more accessible to the world.

[21] She has also been a panelist at several career-related seminars focusing on reducing institutional barriers[22][23][24][25][26] and mentors individuals at various stages of their career, including high school student visitors, undergraduate trainees, doctoral candidates, postdoctoral fellows, professional researchers, and faculty.

And for a very long time this was very hard because I always looked around the room and said ‘Am I out of place speaking up or asking a question or voicing my opinion?’ I overcame that by speaking up, by being the first person in a room to ask a question… Supporting women, supporting underrepresented minorities… it’s important to have diverse views because discovery at a very fundamental level demands diversity.”[17] Naik is also an Executive Producer of “Six Degrees From Science”,[27] a feature-length documentary currently in production that follows passionate biomedical scientists working in competitive and resource-finite environments.