Anil Bhushan earned his PhD in Biophysics at University of California, Davis. He did his postdoctoral fellowship at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies, where he worked on TGF-beta signaling in the specification and patterning of endoderm. He subsequently worked at Institute Curie and Hospital Robert Debre in Paris on pancreatic development, then the Larry Hillblom Islet Research Center at UCLA before coming to UCSF.