My Story

Since childhood, I have been interested in biology. After my undergraduate and graduate degrees, I started a business developing a device to reduce temperature shock cells experience when taken out of the incubator. Later, I identified a niche in transportation, and started a company and grew it to an annual revenue of USD $ 500K. But I missed doing science and moved to Germany, where I started working on my doctoral degree. In my first attempt, I realized the outcome of “mis-leadership” in academia. Shortly after, I left that lab and I was very lucky to find Prof. Dr. Mario Zaiss at the Uniklinik Erlangen. I completed my doctoral degree and over 1 year of postdoctoral research there. During my doctoral studies, I was elected to the advisory board as a co-spokesperson of the Young Immunologist working group within German Society for Immunology. Here I focused on Equality, Diversity, Inclusion, and empowerment of future generations of scientists. Multiple conferences, talks, posters, and experiences later, I joined the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto to work on and learn more about genomics under the supervision of Dr. Faiyaz Notta. Currently, I am holding Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship and Co-chair position at the University Health Network Postdoctoral Association. In July 2022, I gave a talk at TEDxNuremberg about the importance of proper leadership in science and how it leads to reduced morale and motivation that ultimately results in an exodus of brilliant minds from science. In a long run, this can not be good for us, the humanity, as we need more minds working to answer some of the biggest challenges we are facing. We need to raise awareness about the most important duty that leadership in academia seem to forget: Academia is a place to learn and progress to many possible career tracks, whether it be in academia or industry.