Comfortable being uncomfortable

“The journeys of Kalpana Chawla and Kiran Majumdar, in my early childhood, helped me develop an interest in science. I was an average student by convention, but keener to learn practical things. Biotechnology interested me, because of Kiran, but I was convinced early in life that I did not want to work on the core subject, but probably venture more into the applied sciences, in biotechnology firms.

But when I got exposed to the computational training, around this same time, it piqued my interest. I loved how logical and reproducible it was. In order to learn more about it, I enrolled myself in an evening programming course offered at that time by NIIT. I looked forward to attending these classes and doing coding, that’s how much invested I was. I might have been a late bloomer, but eventually I found my calling in bioinformatics and stuck to it ever since.

I joined a Master’s program driven solely by the course content. PhD was a natural transition following that. While applying abroad, I parallelly started working as a trainee with Prof. B. Jayaram at IIT Delhi, which was my first proper stint in computational biology research. I was mesmerized by how I could align a human and a cow protein, something that didn’t excite. people peripheral to me. Nonetheless, I didn’t sway away from my motivation or get influenced by opinions about myself or my interests. The…