We are celebrating South Asian Heritage Month: Unity in Diversity and had a chat with Dr Ajantha Abey, a Post-doctoral Researcher in the Wade-Martins Group
Tell us about your educational and career journey so far i.e. the steps that brought you to your current role at DPAG?
My parents moved from Sri Lanka to Australia with their families when they were relatively young. They were leaving the economic and political turmoil of the 50s and 60s, in which Sri Lanka was experiencing race riots and clashes that would continue for decades. They were setting out for a fresh start in an Australia when it was transitioning out of the "White Australia Policy", which had been in place for more than half a century. My parents had the benefit of a university education in Australia, became citizens, and were working when they met.
I was born and raised in Sydney, Australia, a classic next generation immigrant child. As is common for South Asian families, education was paramount growing up. We were encouraged and supported to do as well as we could in school, and I took many of the many opportunities I was afforded. There was an explicit history to this. I grew up with stories of my great (great?) grandfather in Sri Lanka, a physician, who had made sure all of his children were educated and taught English, and my great grandmother, who was among the first women to come from Sri Lanka and study at LSE, in the early 1900s, before even British women were allowed.
I was also regularly regaled by my uncle, who, as a boy, moved from Sri Lanka to England to train with General Electric as an engineer (and play cricket). In some sense then, England was an ever-present idea as a place to go for further education, and my grandfather regularly reminded me, in classic South Asian fashion, that Oxford and Cambridge were the best of the best, and that I must one day try and make it there. I laboured under no particular aspirations of ever making it that far, and routinely reassured him that I could do research just as well elsewhere.
I ended up doing my undergraduate degree at the University of Sydney. It was there that I fell in love with neuroscience - I had had no exposure to this in high school but took first year psychology on a whim (and a little bit because of hpmor.com), and found all things brain science fascinating and had to pursue it further, and eventually went more and more down the biological end of the neuro-psych spectrum. I continued down that path with an honours degree (similar to an intercalated masters here) in anatomy and histology, worked as an RA for a little over a year before deciding I did want to go down a research pathway and do a PhD. I had done a year abroad at the University of Bristol during my undergraduate, drawn to England by a mixture of family history, friends, and my own personal imaginings of the land of Doctor Who and Harry Potter. I loved the experience, and found I could tolerate the weather for at least one year, so I started looking into postgraduate options.
In summer 2019, I came to visit a number of different iPSC labs, met many friendly professors, was thoroughly grilled by Richard (Wade-Martins) in an interview that ended up redoubling my enthusiasm and ideas about dementia research, and ended up successfully applying to DPAG for my DPhil with a Clarendon Scholarship. Oxford was far from the only place that I applied to, but it was where I was able to get funding, so here is where the winds of fate blew me, and I still regret that my grandfather had died a couple of years earlier, and never got to come and visit me here, the place of his dreams.
Why did you decide to venture into this particular type of science over anything else?
I was absolutely fascinated by everything to do with the brain. In biology - how nerve cells worked, how information processing was subtended by the movement of ions and neurotransmitters; in psychology, how heuristics and biases lead us awry, how groups and individuals behave in predictable ways; in general, how a lump of meat in our skulls can somehow generate conscious experience. It's cool stuff, and I got especially interested in the workings of memory, and how this changed with aging, which led somewhat naturally to Alzheimer's disease, especially as I was trying to figure out how a broad interest in neuroscience could be applied to an important and impactful area of human need.
A journal club on stem cell therapies for Alzheimer's disease caught my eye as a 3rd year undergrad. The postdoc running the seminar series, Tom Duncan, told us he was doing research on a natural model of dementia, and I was immediately captivated by the idea and went to do research with them. I learned a lot about Alzheimer's pathology and solidified my love of neuroanatomy, but kept coming back to the question of selective vulnerability - why some cells developed aggregates but not others. Concurrently, the lab was developing stem cell therapies for Alzheimer's disease, and this was what gave rise to my PhD idea.
Tell us about your research project/focus, including your main objectives?
One of the main focuses of my DPhil research at DPAG has been examining selective neuronal vulnerability in iPSC neurons. Rather than seeing only the post mortem pathology in brain tissue, I wanted to use live cells differentiated from iPSCs into differentially vulnerable neurons, to understand the molecular mechanisms that might underpin this. This has led to a broader interest in developing new models to better understand neurodegenerative disease. My postdoctoral research continues in this theme. My other main project has been to try and generate cellular models of striatal cholinergic interneurons, thought to play an important role in Parkinson's disease and dopamine regulation across a range of neuropsychiatric conditions. Broadly speaking, my research objectives are to develop better models of how cells in the brain work, we so can more accurately understand the molecular basis of neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric diseases in live human cells, and form better rationales for how to treat them.
What has been your career highlight so far and/or what do you most enjoy about your work?
I particularly enjoy the moments of discovery - when you've been working on growing cells for months and stain them and finally put them under the microscope and a nice bright image of the colour / structure / pathology / marker that you were hoping for appears, or when you finally do all the analysis and make the graph and it comes out the way you were hoping it would, those are always excellent and exciting days. I also enjoy conferences, getting to meet people, hear about ideas from all across the field, and spark new ones in myself. I also, maybe uncommonly, really enjoy lab work. The monotony of cell culture and immunofluorescence lends itself to lots of podcast and audiobook listening, which I do a lot of, and I thoroughly enjoy a good spreadsheet.
What challenges have you faced in your career and/or research?
Many of the challenges I have faced are the same as any other, though perhaps slightly compounded by the unusually far distance from home. PhDs are never easy, nor are they meant to be, and iPSC work can keep one at the lab all hours of the week with a somewhat unpredictable schedule, as many of my friends and partner can attest. Moving across the world during the middle of the pandemic outbreak in 2020 and spending three years long distance certainly wasn't easy either, nor is the continued two body problem of trying to find 'stable' jobs for two academics in the same place at the same time. I think it's important to recognise that my Australian upbringing (and passport), and that of my parents' alleviates many of the problems that other South Asians face. Conference travel (and travel in general) is easy for me, and almost always visa free, and moving to and working in the UK is also much cheaper and easier for me as an Australian, whereas other people with South Asian passports routinely face months of checks, fees, and processing for a quick conference trip, as one example of structural barriers faced by many people from the global south.
What is most important to you about your South Asian heritage?
I have a somewhat strange relationship with my South Asian heritage. On the one hand, I have a South Asian name (which people have varied success in pronouncing and remembering, which has its own challenges), and am visibly of South Asian descent. On the other hand, I don't have a strong accent, and while I have visited Sri Lanka with my parents, I grew up Australian, without a strong connection to that Sri Lankan heritage. Part of what is important to me therefore about my South Asian heritage is the ability to connect with other South Asians about little cultural things like dosa or name pronunciation, but part of what is important to me about it is that it is not that important. The aspiration of multicultural societies like Australia and the UK is that anyone should be able to live a good and fulfilling life as an active and integrated member of society, regardless of and while still being proud of their background.
What is inescapable, however, is the thought that if not for the grace of fate at innumerable possible moments in my and my parents' history, I would most likely not be here at Oxford today. From my great grandfather's decision to educate his children in English, recognising the colonial winds shifting, my grandparents' decision to move to Australia, and the opportunities they had to do so, and my parents' successes growing up and working in Australia are all necessary parts of the non-linear equation leading to the life I've led, and it's important to recognise that this month and to think about how to make such opportunities possible for more people too.
Why do you think it's important to celebrate South Asian Heritage Month?
There are too many people at the moment, both in this country and at home in Australia, espousing the view that we should be living in a 'monocultural' society, that 'multiculturalism has failed', and that immigration and diversity bring no value to society at large. I don't think it's important to recognise South Asian Heritage Month on its own, but it has an important place in the broader effort to recognise that we, as researchers and members of society come from a wild and wonderful range of places, backgrounds, upbringings, and varied walks of life. It's valuable to take opportunities such as these to learn about the diverse backgrounds that we came from and the routes that brought us here. It's important to recognise and account for the various advantages and barriers found along those roads, and do the work to try and address them. It is also just as important to simply respect that diversity and cooperation across different groups is what has allowed us to make so much scientific and social progress and live the lives we do today, and we have an obligation to continue doing that work into the future.