Ishara received her Bachelors degree from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, specializing in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 2017. Her passion since her first year at the university was to study the malignant nature of cancer because of the dramatic loss of her aunt due to clear-cell carcinoma of the ovaries in 2013. This led her to choose a research supervisor who worked on cancer biology at the University of Colombo, Department of Chemistry, Prof. Ranil Dassanayake. Her thesis project was titled “Genetic abnormalities in suspicious areas for papillary thyroid carcinoma in patients with chronic autoimmune thyroiditis” for which she received an A+ and this led her to publish a review article titled “BRAF-oncogene-induced senescence and the role of thyroid-stimulating hormone signaling in the progression of Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma” in the Springer journal “Hormones and Cancer”. She also presented her research at the Proceedings of the 1st National Undergraduate Research Symposium organized by the National Science and Technology Commission of Sri Lanka and presented a poster of her research at the Proceedings of the 6th International Conference and Annual Academic Sessions of the College of Pathologists of Sri Lanka in August 2017. She first started her PhD in Molecular, Cellular and Cancer Biology at Indiana University School of Medicine Bloomington in 2018 and joined Dr. Anirban Mitra’s lab, studying the role of the ETS1 transcription factor in high grade serous ovarian cancer. However, she transferred to IU School of Medicine in Indianapolis in 2019 under the Indiana BioMedical Gateway (IBMG) program and was aware of Dr. Xiongbin Lu’s lab and research from her days at IU Bloomington. She met Dr. Lu in person at the symposium conducted by IU for labs that would be recruiting graduate students and showed her interest in his research. After rotating in Dr. Lu’s lab, she joined the lab in April 2020.