Postdoctoral researcher Ankita Chadda, PhD, is enjoying a new sense of security in the lab of Agnieszka Kendrick, PhD, at Salk.  “She’s very straightforward and very planned, which I like,” Chadda says of her faculty advisor. “We meet every week to discuss my plan for experiments and troubleshoot any issues that are coming up.”  Chadda is similar in nature, composed and pragmatic. But “straightforward” isn’t the word she’d use to describe her journey here.  Chadda grew up in Northwestern India in the rugged landscape of the Thar Desert. “I lived between camels and sand dunes,” she says. “It was a small town, and very, very dry.”  Her parents were both doctors and assumed she would follow in their footsteps, but Chadda was cautious about joining the family practice.  “My father was a psychiatrist, so there were always patients visiting the house, and that was hard to see at times,” she says. “But it did make me curious about the human mind and body and interested to understand what goes on inside us on a biochemical level.”  Chadda studied biology in college but didn’t have a clear plan for her career yet. In the years that followed, her personal life took…