Every Wednesday we have been hosting an ‘Away from home’ blogging series which features one Indian postdoc working in a foreign lab. Each post recounts his/her experiences: the triumphs and challenges of lab life, the cultural differences, what they miss about India, as well as some top tips for postdocs headed abroad.
To date, the series has had an excellent response from the scientific and research community worldwide. So for regular readers, and those who are just joining us, we thought we would provide a summary of the first four entries, including an interactive map pinpointing the labs these postdocs are based.
We will continue to update the map each Wednesday and hope that you will join in the online conversation using the #postdochat hashtag.
Proteins in Germany
Teeing off the series for us was Kangkan Halder, who completed his doctoral thesis at the Institute of Genomics & Integrative Biology (IGIB), New Delhi, India. He is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Applied Synthetic Biology Group at the University of Göttingen, Germany. Read about his quest for developing a method to study structural changes and dynamics in proteins, and his experiences with sneeze-inducing Indian spices in a shared German kitchen!
Modeling biology
Synthetic and systems biologist Kayzad Nilgiriwala tells us in the second blog of the series, he wants to import some strong points from the US research scene when he comes back home. He is a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA. Kayzad completed his Ph.D. in Microbiology at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Mumbai, India.
An eye for funds
The funding problems independent postdoctoral researchers (with visas) may face in the US, was one of the highlights of Moumita Chaki’s blog. A PhD from Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (IICB-CSIR), Kolkata, currently working as a Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan Medical School, USA.
Where animals and reagents abound
Our final blogger for the month was Mainpal Rana, a PhD from the Biological Sciences and Bioengineering Department of Indian Institute of TechnologyKanpur and currently a postdoctoral associate at the Magee-Womens Research Institute Pittsburgh, USA. He tells us about the joys of not having to wait for reagents for experiments and the woes of not having Indian utensils in an American kitchen.
You can see where our November postdocs are based in the Away from home interactive map pictured below.
{credit}Google maps{/credit}