Kalika earned his B. Sc. from University of Allahabad (Uttar Pradesh) and M. Sc. from M. S. University Baroda (Gujarat) and Ph.D. degree from Indian Institute of Science Bangalore (Karnataka). During his training in plant molecular genetics as graduate student in Usha Vijayraghavan laboratory he visited several laboratories in US, UK and Singapore. Kalika also visited Massey University (Barbara Ambrose laboratory, New Zealand). Kalika was EMBO fellow in Ben Scheres Laboratary (Utrecht University, The Netherlands).

Plants not only have remarkable ability to regrow lost parts, they can even regenerate an entirely new plant from a few existing cells. de novo regeneration offers an elegant model to address number of fundamental questions related to acquisition of pluripotent state, reconstitution of stem cells, assembly of regulatory interactions that eventually lead to formation of a complete plant in the absence of embryonic positional cues. Our laboratory is engaged in probing the dynamic cellular events and underlying mechanisms of regeneration. We use cell biological tools, genetics, genomics and computational modeling to answer the questions of our interest. Our long-term goal is to underpin the basic principles and dynamics of self-organization using plant regeneration as a model.