Our ‘Away from home’ blogging series features one Indian postdoc working in a foreign lab every Wednesday. The posts recount the experience of these postdocs — the triumphs and challenges of lab life, the cultural differences, what they miss about India — and, most importantly, offer some useful tips for postdocs headed abroad.
The series has had an excellent response from the scientific and research community worldwide. For our regular readers, and those who are just joining us now, we provide a summary of the month’s entries, including an interactive map pinpointing the labs these postdocs are based. All these interesting entries and summaries can be found under the ‘Away from home’ category of the Indigenus blog.
We will continue to update the map each Wednesday and hope that you will join in the online conversation using the #postdochat hashtag.
Nanotech dream for rural India
The first post in March was from Archana Swami, a Ph.D from IGIB, New Delhi, India and currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Nanomedicine and Biomaterials of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, USA. Archana is also part of the Robert Langer group at The David Koch Institute at MIT, Boston, USA. The young researcher and mom talks about how family forms an integral support base for women scientists. She harbours a fond dream of transforming Indian villages armed with nanotechnology and says the scientific community in Boston is so enriched that it’s very easy to find good collaborations and learn new science with them.
Biomaterial and some ‘craic’
We heard from Akshay Srivastava, a doctorate from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, and currently a postdoc at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Akshay is living it up in Ireland bathed in good cheer and making targeted gene delivery vehicles for regeneration of the inter-vertibral disc. He says many institutes and universities in India are doing world class research and there’s good amount of funding in science now. His only cribs are India’s bureaucracy and the government’s not-so-professional attitude towards the health industry, of which he wants to become a part when he comes back home.
‘Research not Nobel-driven’
Our last blogger of March was Arghya Basu, who wears many hats — that of a membrane protein researcher, an amateur photographer and a weekend hiking enthusiast. A doctorate from Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, Kolkata, India, Arghya now lives his many passions working at the University of Alberta, Canada and says research might not always fetch you a Nobel but should be able to make life better for some. He gives out a harsh weather alert for postdocs headed towards Canada but says if you are the adventure loving sort and also enjoy the magic of science, research and Canada are for you.
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