Second Postdoc: Reuniting with Family in Hyderabad

A mobile science exhibition initiative by CCMB in collaboration with other institutes.

Often one encounters research pairs in academic settings either at a student, Postdoc, or faculty level. This is for the sole reason of staying together to be able to build a family while working in either the same institute or a city. In this ever-changing world, emotional support that comes from near and dear ones is very much needed. Staying together helps not only personally but financially too.

This was the reason for my returning only to Hyderabad, compromising job opportunities in exchange for being with my family. Mind you, there are many opportunities in Hyderabad so it’s not entirely to my disadvantage to think about job prospects solely in the “City of Pearls”!

During my first Postdoc at Omaha, I approached various Hyderabad Research Centers/Institutes and got a response from some of them. Ultimately only a professor from CCMB replied positively to my interest. But there was a catch, I could only work with self-funding as currently the lab was out of funds. So, I started looking for available fellowship sources by writing to science bodies and checking online. I found out about the CSIR-SRA fellowship to which I applied and luckily secured funding to carry out research here.

I reached Hyderabad in Dec’2019 and since I could avail fellowship anytime within a year so took some time off. But then covid stuck and I was unable to join the program. I ended up joining CCMB in the latter half of 2020 and started working on my project immediately. I had ample time to know the place and get the hang of people around. But when I joined the lab, due to Covid all the previous lab members had left the lab. I barely survived as one old student had joined another lab in CCMB and helped navigate us through. However, since my project was independent I could have still made my way through slowly but it was important to learn the lab ways to begin with.

There was another problem, none of my reagents were in the lab and a lot of approvals had to be done to order them. As many familiar with academia here know, it often takes time for reagents to reach us. Since I had some basic bioinformatics understanding, I utilized this time to conduct insilico analysis relevant to my project. My project was focused on correlating glycosylation to the HER2 status of breast cancer, and so I used a prior understanding of cancer and glycobiology to get relevant data, which worked out well with my hypothesis.

In the meantime, I received reagents and familiarized myself with the cell culture there. Even the use of basic techniques such as cell culture demanded utmost care and respect without which the tropical climate god forbade us from working. It was a challenging time so things worked slowly. I also had personal problems and continuous health setbacks which prohibited me from being productive.

Since my joining CCMB, I contacted many labs globally for a particular Breast Cancer cell line as I could not commercially order the cell line initially due to various reasons, but later things worked out. Otherwise, I got to meet many students here reliving my own time as a student. Being in a research institute also provided opportunities to interact with faculties and participate in scientific talks/ conferences, which I utilized well.

Overall, it was a vastly different research experience than I had either as an undergrad at IITK or a PhD/ Postdoc in the US. I generated a couple of good insights from the project (In publication phase) which I presented at HySci’23 conference. I also won the Awasar Award (2020-21) and published a review article in the Glycobiology journal as the first and corresponding author.

I ended up spending around 3 years here and finally decided to call it off from pursuing science as an experimentalist. I realized I wasn’t doing much justice to either the science or scientists around me by being an experimentalist. But mind you, this decision to quit came after >10 years of academic research that went into building me and will go a long long way. If given an opportunity, I still would like to manage a life science lab at a techno-managerial level.

As many of us know, there are other ways to contribute to science!