Saif joined the Mahajan lab in 2015 as an undergraduate from the University of Bath in England. He pursued and helped solve the first X-ray crystal structure of calpain-5 and performed various structural biology techniques to study protein stability and conformation change. After spending a year in the lab, he returned to England to complete his B.S. in Biochemistry and later joined the Protein and Crystallography Facility at the University of Iowa. Saif has been accepted into the Molecular Biology graduate program at USC for fall 2021 where he will be  focusing on Cryo-Electron Microscopy.