Postdoc Liton Roy is our featured scientist of the month. You can find Liton on LinkedIn, twitter @LitonRoy, and his website. Read on to find out why Liton decided to pursue a career in chemistry and his passion for Alzheimer’s disease research.
How did you first become interested in Science?
I was good at Math in high school, especially arithmetic and obviously my parents wanted me to be a software engineer. It’s like every parents dream in India that their offspring would be a computer engineer or a doctor. During my senior high, my chemistry teacher told me that I should major in chemistry. I did not know what he saw in me or what he actually meant, but I sort of liked that idea of being something else than cookie cutter computer engineer. I always wanted to be different from the rest of the crowd and that sort of fed the idea to pursue career as a chemist.
How did you first decide your area of research?
While pursuing bachelor’s degree at Presidency College, a Ph.D. student once told me get acquainted with biology and later on I became very interested in biology. I started doing some biochemical research at the Bose Research Institute in India as a summer intern. I took quite a bit of biological chemistry classes during my stay at the Indian Institute of Technology where I did my M.S. in Chemistry. So, after coming to US, all I wanted to do is to solve biological problems. Now I work on de novo protein design using self-selecting secondary structure elements. So far I have developed a high throughout strategy to identify and isolate small highly stable globular proteins from library of peptides.
What is the most challenging situation that you faced in lab?
During my graduate career at the Michigan State University, my Ph.D. advisor decided to leave the university to move elsewhere. At that moment I didn’t know what to do and those were some most difficult times I have faced in my research career thus far. I could not foresee what was coming and I ended up in University of Vermont a year after and I had to start all over again. It was not easy but I don’t have any regrets. Read More…
How did you first become interested in the science field?
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