Cultural Transitions: Building a Career in American Science [Video]

In this episode, we hear from Dr. Yamini Dalal, Senior Investigator and Senior Advisor for Faculty Development, and Dr. Sweta Sikder, Postdoctoral Fellow in NCI Center for Cancer Research. They discuss their experiences of moving to the US for their scientific careers, including the challenges they faced and the opportunities and benefits of working in the US. They also share their paths to biology, passion for their research, and much more!

Show Notes

Yamini Dalal, Ph.D.

Sweta Sikder, Ph.D.

NCI Center for Cancer Research (CCR)

Biochemistry by Donald Voet and Judith Voet

NCI K99/R00 – Pathway to Independence Award

NCI Intramural Research Program

Ad: Interagency Oncology Task Force Fellowship (IOTF)

Your Turn Recommendations:

The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI by Fei-Fei Li (book)

Hear the Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami (book)

Behind Her Eyes (Netflix series)

Poor Things (movie)

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (book) & 3 Body Problem (Netflix series)

The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by Michael Strevens (book)

 TRANSCRIPT

Oliver Bogler Hello and welcome to Inside Cancer Careers, a podcast from the National Cancer Institute where we explore all the different ways people fight cancer and hear their stories. I’m your host, Oliver Bogler from NCI’s Center for Cancer Training. May is Asian American and Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage Month and is dedicated to celebrating the contributions members of these communities make to the United States. One of the things I love about science is that it is an international enterprise, bringing people from all over the world together to focus on shared goals like ending cancer as we know it. As a result, many scientists leave their homes and live and work in another country.

Today, we’re talking to two scientists originally from India who have made the NCI’s Intramural Research Program their scientific home. And we’ll be talking to them about what it was like to come to the US to pursue their science and how it’s going and their careers. Listen through to the end of the show to hear our guests make some interesting recommendations and where we invite you to take your turn.

So it’s a pleasure to welcome Dr. Yamini Dalal, senior investigator in the Laboratory of Receptor Biology and Gene Expression in NCI’s Center for Cancer Research. Welcome.

Yamini Dalal

Thank you all of you.

Oliver Bogler

Welcome also to Dr. Sweta Sikder. She is a visiting postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Yamini’s research group. Welcome.

Sweta Sikder

Thank you.

Oliver Bogler

So you both came to America during your early careers. Yamini, you came to pursue graduate work at Purdue and Sweta, you came for your postdoc at the NCI. We’ll talk about your careers later, but I wanted to start by asking you what it was like to move to another country for your science.

Yamini Dalal

All right. Well, thank you, Oliver, for hosting us on this fantastic show. I’ve listened to the blogs in the past and I really find it a great way to disseminate what we’re doing here at the NCI and share our perspectives. I came to the US when I was, I think, 22 or 23 and I left India on Independence Day, which was sort of a bittersweet feeling. And I moved to the Midwest to pursue graduate school. And the first thing that was the biggest challenge for me was the weather because I grew up in Bombay, which is subtropical, and it’s never cold. And the very first thing I discovered about the Midwest is that it gets really, really, really cold in the winter. And then in a way, I suppose that spurred my scientific studies because I didn’t want to leave Lily Hall, which is nice and warm all winter round. Sweta?

Sweta Sikder

Yes, so for me, it was a very unique kind of an experience. I came to US for the first time to join Yamini’s lab as a postdoctoral fellow. And incidentally, I landed or my flight landed exactly the day before the government shut down. That is in 2020, where the whole world shut down to say.

Yamini Dalal

On the Ides of March very appropriately.

Sweta Sikder

I just had a day to come to NIH to get registered here. And then we were all like doing the pandemic shutdown and at home. So when I was pursuing my career, there was always this thing that you should, if you are in science, you should always have that US exposure of science. But for me, when I landed finally in the US, it was a very, it was a very different kind of experience.

Things started changing slowly. But what I faced for a long time is like being in a society which is so open, but where you cannot really access people…