My name is Priya. I'm a second year PhD student. Our lab's main focus is neurodegenerative
disorders, but Alzheimer's is like our model, because we need to take an example to explain
all the neurdegenerative disorders, so we are trying to identify what causes it and
in what ways we can treat it or manage it.
So I'm basically from India. So I did all my previous education over there until I moved
here to pursue my PhD. My parents are not scientists. My dad is into finance and my
mom is into law so we are completely different from anywhere close to science. I was always
interested in biology, it always excited me, the urges to know how animals, plants adapt
to changing environment fascinated me. So initially I got into research just by chance,
so I had my Masters in Human Genetics where we had to do six months research work, and
it so happened that I got into neurodegenerative disorder research, where I worked, I concentrated
mainly on Parkinson's Disease, and coincidentally it so happened that at the same time my grandfather,
my dad's dad was diagnosed with Parkinson's like symptoms, unfortunately due to which
he passed away. So I think that further motivated me to get into research focused mainly on
neurdegenerative disorders and that's how I am here.
So my short term goal is to get something beneficial to the society to its neurodegenerative
disorders and to make something, to give something useful for the cure or treatment or even management
of neurodegenerative disorders. We mainly work on flies, that is Drosophila the fruit
flies which we find in, find in all the ripened fruits and it's really interesting that their
genetic makeup is very similar to ours, so that's our main model organism, and then we
use tools such as pipettes and petri dish, which is the small dishes on which we do dissections.
Life in the lab is really exciting, especially initially when you come in. There are a lot
of people, such as other graduate students. There are a lot of undergrads who we interact
with and lab technicians so it's, it's very social in fact, it's not a very lonely life,
but I guess as you get towards your motivational research you are more focused and then you
get to interact lesser I guess with the undergraduates, but on the whole I think it's, it's not lonely.
It's like involves a lot of interactions. We have a lot of social events where we get
together and talk science as well as other stuff.
Hopefully all my research turns out to be amazing and I get to have my own lab one day
where I would have students working under me. Hopefully I'm able to mentor them and
get something really good for the society. So if you're interested in science, if you
like to learn or discover different things, if you like to do experiments which you would
have done in your high school and learn about organisms, teach about organisms, write about
organisms, then I think this is the right place for you, you should get into research.
Or a lab. Yeah.