Pooja is a Kenyan-Born "modern nomad".

Her academic career started with a First class (Hons) MChem (Chemistry) degree from Coventry University which included an industrial placement at GlaxoSmithKline. She then went on to pursue a PhD. at the University of Warwick with the late Prof. Mark Rodger. This was part funded by industry (Cabot Speciality Fluids) and by the Warwick Postgraduate Scholarship. The project involved Computational and Experimental Studies of Formate Brines. These are dense but viscose salt brines used in oil drilling applications. 

In 2005, Pooja moved to the Dept. of Physics and Materials Science at Uppsala University, Sweden, on a FP7 project looking at diagnosing malaria using a magneto-optical technique which would be fast, efficient and reliable and most importantly non-invasive. After 3 ½  years she joined the University of Bath as an EPSRC Research Officer working on  materials with applications in Renewable Energy Technologies such as Fuel Cells,  Lithium Ion Battery materials and Thin Film PV materials. Since then she has been Senior Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield, before joining Loughborough as a Lecturer in 2015.​