Cover picture credit: K Sangeetha
Life post PhD is super awesome and exciting. You get the opportunity to come out from your PhD bubble, and get to know better about challenges and opportunities ahead of you. Planning ahead of time is a vital component to widen our opportunities post PhD. I started planning about the journey before I finished my PhD (2-3 years ahead). This planning attribute is fully credited to the scientific mentors who motivated & encouraged me to plan both short term (5 years) and long term (10-20 years) interests. Interaction with non PhD thesis mentors is very essential to develop and get wider perspectives about academic careers, and getting to know about their past experiences is a plus. As a student, I was lucky & privileged to interact with many of them via collaborative projects, and informal random interactions. Apart from local mentors, social networking platforms, especially twitter, provided me not only resources but also, inspiring scientists in the area of computational biology, genomics, public health, machine learning and community science (eLife Initiatives) etc. These inspiring scientists not only provide quality scientific resources but also, their perspective related to academic career, funding, and mentorships. Getting to know them through their work and perspective on different horizons really helps us in developing thoughts about things beyond doing research, like family, friends, mental health, peer to peer acknowledgement etc. Overall, I believe what worked in my favor was the planning ahead of time, making the prerequisite network and working on the skills and projects that helped me when I actually completed my PhD and it was easier to transition from a PhD fellow to a postdoctoral fellow.
“Good Science is Addictive”
Dr. Gagandeep Kang (source: Twitter)
To move from Computational Biology & Genomics field to Healthcare was purely based on the recommendations and collective perspectives from the non PhD mentors. After PhD, I joined Center of Excellence in Healthcare, IIIT Delhi as a project coordinator (postdoc fellow) under the mentorship of Dr. Tavpritesh Sethi. During this tenure, I got exposure to healthcare challenges and opportunities in India; and got lots of opportunities to contribute to healthcare projects. This phase includes contributing with my existing skill sets; training & up-skilling scholars in the projects; and learning & acquiring new skills to
complete the projects.
After postdoctoral training at IIIT, Delhi, I joined as a Faculty Fellow at the Department of Computer Science, Ashoka University, and as a Data Scientist at the Mphasis Lab of Machine Learning & Computational Thinking, Ashoka University. My long term interests are as follows:
- Training biomedical scholars (biologist to public health researchers) in the area of computational biomedical research, and providing long term support.
- Partner with like-minded researchers for collective science for patient-centric biomedical research.
- Benchmark, develop tools in the area of Spatial Biology for health and disease.
Please feel free to ask or connect for any queries or doubts via social media or over email.
Thank you all for your time.
Rintu Kutum
Rintu Kutum is a Faculty Fellow (Data Scientist) at Ashoka University who is excited to explore new data analysis strategies and strongly supports reproducible science.