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.
This month we covered a wonderful mix of postdocs in terms of their geographical spread, disciplines and dreams. We featured postdocs from the US, Canada and Singapore with a wide array of interests — from biological modelling to regenerative medicine and from healthcare delivery to academics.
Mastering industry-academia links
Dilraj Lama, a PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Bioinformatics Institute, A*STAR, Singapore was our first blogger for the month. Dilraj is having a great time with biological modelling and simulation experiments as he seamlessly blends in with the local community owing to similar facial features. Exposed to a healthy multi-disciplinary work team, he is also learning important lessons in industry-academia linkages early on in his research life.
Marital science bliss
Talking about how marriage catapulted her further into her scientific pursuits was Atrayee Banerjee. Atrayee has a Masters in Environmental Management from the Indian Institute of Social Welfare and Business Management (IISWBM), Calcutta, India and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Missouri-Rolla. Right now, she works at the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Maryland, USA.
Regenerative medicine & skiing
Next up, we had Anand Krishnan, a PhD from the Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India and currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute, University of Calgary, Canada. Anand is focusing his energies on regenerative medicine under a clinician-scientist mentor. Anand relieves his research stress in multicultural and beautiful Calgary, a place that comes with enviable perks in the form of skiing holidays and cool summers.
A journey through academia
Our fourth and final blogger of the month was Akhilesh Gaharwar. Akhilesh is currently a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University, and will be joining Texas A&M University, USA as an assistant professor a couple of months later. He tells us about his fascinating academic journey from an undergraduate student in India to a faculty in a leading US University. Akhilesh exemplifies two things — that hard work has no alternative and that you can never go wrong if you follow your heart.
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