Dr. Vandana Vinayak belongs to Jalandhar Punjab, India, and has moved places for education due to her family’s army background. She has done her Master degree with majors in Biochemistry and minor in Microbiology split Biotechnology from Punjab Agricultural University Ludhiana. Her post graduate dissertation work was to on Capsaicin content via enzyme analysis from callus and suspension cultures from pungent varieties of Capsicum annuum. She did her Ph.D in Biochemistry from Kurukshetra University, Haryana, India while she was employed as project fellow in a National  Oilseeds  and  Vegetable  Oils  Development  (NOVOD)  Board  project on “Micro-propagation of potential tree borne oil plants-protocol development for multiplication in Jatropha” under the supervision of Plant Biotechnologist Prof A.K Dhawan (Retd. Prof. Haryana Agricultural University, Director Center for Plant Biotechnology, Prof. NIFTEM and Prof cum Dean Central University of Punjab, currently Vice President KamTek (MNC), Maryland, USA). During her Ph.D she worked on callus and suspension cultures from thirty one Inter-specific hybrids of Saccharum to check their high sucrose content via Refractive Index, Polarimetry, Radioactivity, enzymes, protein (SDS PAGE) and PCR markers (Micro satellites). 

Thereafter she joined State Forensic Science Laboratory Haryana as Senior Scientific Officer Biology and gained knowledge on use of plant algae diatom and its importance in death due to drowning cases. During this period she solved about 4000 criminal cases and about 5 cases of National Importance. This drew her much interest on diatoms in different fields of science besides forensic and has thereafter increased her bioscope on diatoms research in different fields of Diatom Bio nanotechnology.

She had been accorded with Young Scientist award, Meritorious Laureate award from various scientific Organisations and Noel Deer Gold medal award from “His Excellency President of India Dr. A.P.J Abdul Kalam”. In 2023, she has been listed as top 2% scientist category by Stanford University published by Elsevier Publisher metrics.

Currently Dr. Vandana Vinayak works as Assistant Professor (School of Applied Sciences), Deptt of Crim. and Forensic Science at Dr. Hari Singh Gour Vishwavidhyalaya (ACentral University), Sagar, Madhya Pradesh, India. Her research is focused much on Diatom Nano engineering and Metabolism (DNM). She looks onto different aspects to harvest biofuel from diatoms (DiafuelTM) and use of diatoms as nanomaterials in the different fields of Bio nanotechnology.