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, Ashok moved to Economics and graduated with an MA in 1987 from the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University. He then spent the next 14 years teaching economics in an undergraduate college of Delhi University in India. However his childhood dream of becoming a scientist never quite left him, and he finally decided to go back to it. In 2001 he left his tenured job and came to Brandeis University to do a PhD in physics at the age of 37. He did a PhD, with Jane' Kondev as adviser, in soft matter theory in 2006. While at Brandeis he fell in love with Biology, and after his PhD he joined the lab of Arup Chakraborty at MIT as a postdoc from 2006-08, where he worked on modeling the activation of T cells. He joined Colorado State University as an Assistant Professor in the Chemical and Biological Engineering department 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. His synthetic biology interests include understanding theoretical properties of synthetic circuits, computational modeling to help metabolic engineering of cyanobacteria and developing methods for quantitative testing of control circuits in plants