Ashok Prasad is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.  Ashok has had a somewhat unusual career path. After a BS in physics, he shifted fields  and graduated with an MA in Economics in 1987 from Delhi University, India. He then spent the next 14 years teaching economics in an undergraduate college of Delhi University. However his childhood dream of becoming a scientist never quite left him, and in 2001 he left his tenured job and came to Brandeis University to do a PhD in physics at the age of 37. His PhD work was on biologically inspired soft matter physics (with Jane'  Kondev), and he followed that with a postdoc in computational immunology with Arup Chakraborty at MIT. He joined CSU in 2009. His research interests are diverse, and his group currently studies the determination of cell shape, the theoretical properties of signaling and gene transcription networks, helps develop plant synthetic biology, looks for signatures of drug susceptibility in gene expression of cancer cells using big data and artificial intelligence approaches and does genome scale metabolic modeling of cyanobacteria.