Veronica Filomena Rodrigues carried out her early education in Nairobi, Kenya and her undergraduate studies at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She was awarded BA in 1976 having majored in the Natural Sciences. She subsequently joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai as a graduate student in the laboratory of Professor Obaid Siddiqi. Upon completion of her PhD in 1982, she embarked upon postdoctoral training with Professor Karl Goetz and Erich Buchner at the Max-Planck Institut fur Biologische Kybernetik, Germany. She returned to India in 1985 to establish her laboratory at TIFR, where she is working as Professor now.

Academic & Research Achievements: While at the Max-Planck Institute, Dr Rodrigues showed that information about odors is encoded as pattern of activation across neurons within the olfactory lobe of Drosophila. Upon returning to India, she initiated studies aimed at understanding how this circuitry develops and what are the mechanisms that underlie function. The goal of her laboratory is to understand how chemosensory circuits develop to allow complex function and what are the ways using which circuits can be modified to adapt to a varying environment. She has supervised nine PhD students.

Awards and Honours: Dr Rodrigues was awarded the Golden Jubilee Commemoration Medal (Biological Sciences) (2004) by INSA, the National Woman Bioscience Award (2004) and the JC Bose Fellowship (2007). She was also elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore.