‘My generation gets to paint the picture of a Bangladesh where women scientists have the agency to design their own futures’: Senjuti Saha

After 11 years of studying, working and living in Canada, I came back to my birth country, with the hope of working in Bangladesh, with Bangladeshis, serving Bangladesh. It has been a journey, perhaps fairly encapsulated by the evening above.

I came to Bangladesh in 2016 with the objective of understanding the causes of meningitis, an infection of the brain, in Bangladeshi children. After two years of failures overlaid with failures, I successfully set up a state-of-the-art DNA sequencing facility in Bangladesh. We are gradually chipping away at making an atlas of the causes of common childhood diseases with the hope of assisting our policymakers design policies for introducing vaccines and therapeutics to prevent and tackle childhood infections. The journey so far has not been one that I had, in any way, imagined.

As soon as I started working in Bangladesh, I realised the opportunities we, as scientists, have to contribute to society. The burden of diseases is very high in countries like ours, but much of the burdens and the root causes remain unexplored — this gives molecular microbiologists like me the opportunity to pick from a wide variety of options. Almost every project I have been a part of has made a tangible difference in real time — for example, when we discovered that chikungunya virus can cause meningitis, hospital labs immediately rolled out diagnostics to test for it regularly.

In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged through the country, we leveraged our genomics facility to sequence the first SARS-CoV-2 in Bangladesh. Following our work, multiple other groups across the country have joined us in our sequencing efforts. Not only did we gain support from our scientist friends, we achieved recognition from the entire country because of our contribution towards public health. However, what perhaps continues to be the most rewarding experience are messages from young women saying they also want to be scientists and work for their country. I have received notes from mothers encouraging me, and promising that they will bring up their daughters to become scientists, too.

In the last few years, I feel my work has moved from setting up a research facility to creating a space where young women scientists like Leena from different parts of the country can be trained in state-of-the-art techniques. This has given me the platform, in whatever capacity I have, to educate, engage and empower young women at the frontlines of public health. When Leena’s eyes light up with excitement, my heart fills up with pride.

But at the same time, I continue to manoeuvre the barriers laid by our society, not uncommon in South Asia. Research is a lifestyle; like the Wednesday night described above, many nights we cannot predict when the experiments in the laboratory will end. When I work with male scientists, they can dedicate all their time, go home late at night, and continue their work even after they reach home. For a woman, no matter how much dedication she has towards the work, lack of road safety forces her to constantly worry about getting home on time, social expectations pressurise her to drop her bag as soon as she reaches home to help with household chores. And, then, as a young woman scientist plans on starting a family, lack of formal childcare support constantly keeps on reminding her that she cannot “have it all”. We must constantly choose between family/societal expectations, and our career/contributions to science.

What I personally miss are role models to follow, women who could show me the path forward, women who have already faced these problems and still strived on. However, this also gives me and my generation of women scientists the motivation to pave the path forward according to our needs. There are no set expectations on what a woman scientist should look like, so I get to define that. My generation gets to paint the picture of a Bangladesh where women scientists have the agency to design their own futures just like their scientific experiments.