Photo credit: K. Sangeetha
I joined my PhD at IGIB as an enthusiastic and confident person who had done well in her master’s degree courses and PhD interviews. In my first 3 years at IGIB, I was constantly learning. It also resulted in emotional ups and downs, which were quite turbulent. I could deal with experimental failures well, but my heart would sink whenever I was asked a question with the expectation that I would have done my literature survey and I wouldn’t know the answer. I knew this wasn’t personal. The intention was to get me up to speed so that I could do my research well. But my emotions didn’t listen to logic. I made it worse by not dealing with my mental state well. I would sweep my feelings under the carpet; learn the thing I didn’t know and move on (or pretend to move on). As a result, I was constantly laden with a feeling of inadequacy and thoughts of self-doubt. In the third year of my PhD, I realised that I might be at a dead end in my PhD problem and that is when all of this blew up inside me.
I convinced myself that a PhD is not for me, handed over my resignation and packed my bags. But things did not go according to plan, thankfully for me. I had multiple discussions about this with my colleagues and mentors. I told Dr. Rajesh Gokhale, then Director of IGIB, that I’m not good enough to do this. He smiled like he has seen this a lot of times and asked me – “and who decides that?” (paraphrased). He told me what I am going through is a typical 3rd year PhD slump. I went back and found many studies which show that almost half the PhD students go through this. I was also given a fresh chance to choose a PhD problem and got enough support from the IGIB community to plan the course ahead.
So, in this second round of discussions, I got interested in Ayurgenomics and had a few discussions with Dr. Mitali Mukerji. We decided to work on an interesting Ayurgenomics problem where I would study cellular differences among healthy humans of extreme constitution types. I had to start afresh, but I was better equipped with the skills I had already learnt in the first 3 years. I also learnt to be aware of and to take care of my mental health. I not only worked on Ayurgenomics but modified my lifestyle according to Ayurvedic recommendations by Dr. Bhavana Prasher. This improved the anxiety and insomnia I had experienced earlier. These changes to my approach allowed me to thoroughly enjoy working with the Ayurgenomics group for the next three years. I had some very exciting results and needed around four to five months to close the story when the COVID19 pandemic hit. It was even more challenging because by husband had finished his PhD and gone on to join a job in the United Kingdom.
During the pandemic I spent almost a year living alone in Delhi, finishing my experiments, and writing my paper. I had exhausted my fellowship. Considering my mental and financial state, I took a special permission to finish my PhD from the UK. Personally, things fell into place. I could get my findings published and finished my thesis working remotely. And then came the next challenge – moving on from the PhD and getting a job.
In the last year of my PhD, I had had a few discussions with Dr. Mitali about my future. I told her that I want to shift to a field where I can tackle the problems caused by human degradation of the environment. This was very different from my training in cell biology, but the idea arose because of this training.
I have spent a good amount of time in the cell culture hood, working on cell lines. Along with a multitude of failed experiments and a few successful ones, I have also generated a large amount of single use plastic waste. By the last year of my PhD, I started asking myself – am I being selfish in using plastics for my experiments? Will my study be relevant enough to justify the amount of plastic waste I have generated? If I continued to work on human health problems, my studies would probably help save human lives in future (best case scenario). But will humans have a future if environmental pollution continues in its present scale?
I went through a tumultuous 5 months of job applications to post doc and industry positions. I had several rejections from interviews even from the ones which I thought I did well in. I had started to question whether my skills were enough to get a job, when I secured an R&D job at Fiberight Ltd. It is a company aiming to achieve the end of waste. This means sending nothing to incinerators or landfills. I work on developing new technologies which help recycle the non-recyclables. We can separate and purify the paper and plastic component of tetrapacks, so that both can be used again. A particularly interesting stream of product recovered from waste is paper pulp. We are using paper pulp as a substrate to produce sugars. The first time I saw the peak of glucose on my HPLC computer screen, generated from complete rubbish, I couldn’t believe my eyes! Apart from working on the development of the technology and testing, I also get to work in an environment which I have never been exposed to before. I work with process engineers, scientists and colleagues from manufacturing and production. Also, work life balance is ingrained here. It is normal to switch off at 5 pm and it is considered rude to send work emails after that. The HR doesn’t like it if you work late or don’t use your holidays. Most people are into sports, so me talking about my marathon training is considered normal here. It is a very different ball game for someone who has only seen academics in India. Interestingly, I’m the only woman who works ‘on site’.
So here I am, in my pink safety helmet and orange rimmed safety goggles, surrounded by ten thousand litre reactors and tanks. Watching and helping build new plants which would help achieve the end of waste.

Sumita Chakraborty
Sumita Chakraborty worked on micobacterial biology and Ayurgenomics while at IGIB. She has now moved on to work with Fiberight, where she works on innovative research to process non recyclable waste such that nothing ends up in landfills/incinerators.