Following her doctoral training at Indiana State University, USA with Gary Stuart, she did brief post-doctoral stints with Christopher Wright at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA (1995-1996), and Vladimir Korzh at the Institute of Molecular Agrobiology, Singapore (1997-1998). She was a visiting scientist at EMBL (host: Anne Ephrussi) in 1999, and started her independent programme in 2000 as a fellow at the Institute of Molecular Agrobiology, Singapore. She was a group leader at Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory, National University of Singapore from 2002-2013. The Sampath lab is located on the Gibbett Hill campus of the University of Warwick. The group is funded by Warwick Medical School, Warwick Quantitative Biomedicine Programme, the BBSRC and the Leverhulme Trust.