We had a great turnout with 7 undergraduate students, 1 graduate student, 1 staff member, and 1 faculty member from CSUN. We sat around the table in the Chemistry & Biochemistry conference room EH 2102B. After a round of introductions, where each student shared their major and who (if anyone) they were doing research with. Then Deepali told us more about her career.
She was educated in India, completing her undergraduate and Master's degree in microbiology by the time she was 22 years old. The system in India requires that students choose in the 10th grade whether they want to do down a medical path or a non-medical path (leading to engineering).
Deepali found her first job in industry through her department chair. The company was looking to start a lab from scratch. Her advisor was the only molecular biologist in her department. She had experience with thermostable restriction enzymes and the company wanted her to design a DNA ladder, as well as easy kits (like Qiagen MiniPrep) for RNA purification.
When she arrived at the company, she was given a completely empty room and she was able to choose all the equipment, reagents, and coworkers (she interviewed candidates and built her team). Another aspect of her job was to be a liason to her former university. She was tasked with arranging the curriculum and instructional labs, which fostered a love of teaching. This motivated her to go back to school after working in industry for 2 years, because she needed a PhD to teach at university.
She studied molecular biology at Loyola University in Chicago, which took her 5 years to complete. For her post-doc she came to University of California San Diego, for another 5 years. During that time she studied cellular traffic in both yeast and cancer cells. She became interested in how cancer cells survive lack of oxygen and lack of nutrients. Healthy cells undergo programmed cell death under the same conditions. This is termed ER stress which arises in misfolded proteins.
One question that came from the students was, "Why do a PhD?" Deepali explained how her PhD experience taught her resiliency in the face of months of failure in the lab. She now has a poster hanging up in her lab that encourages her students to be persistent when faced with adversity.
A special thanks goes out to everyone who helped make this a great "Student Time" with the speaker. The next outside speaker is Dr Gregory Fu from Caltech who will be visiting CSUN on Wednesday, April 4th.
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