I work in a lab looking for molecules that can kill cancer cells. Most days it does not work. That is kind of the point. You keep going.
When I am not in the lab, I am watching films. Quietly. In the dark. I think science and cinema are more similar than people give them credit for. Both are just ways of trying to understand what is happening around us.
I am based in St. Louis and I come from Nepal. I am figuring things out one experiment at a time.
I was twelve years old in a school library in Nepal when I first read about Marie Curie. It was a tattered biography with a torn cover. I remember the sentence that made me stop. She had discovered two elements, won two Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, and done all of it while being told she did not belong in the room.
What got me was not the genius part. It was that she kept going in a leaking shed, carrying radioactive material in her pockets, teaching herself new languages, walking into rooms that did not want her there. And slowly the room changed around her.
I came to the United States on a student visa with a suitcase and a vague belief that chemistry might be my way into something meaningful. The lab felt like the one place where your passport does not matter. Only your results do. That is what Curie gave me. Permission to believe the work speaks for itself.
Today I research cancer compounds at Washington University in St. Louis. Every time something does not work and most things do not, I think of her in that shed. And I try again. Science is not glamorous. It is just stubbornness in a lab coat.
And when I need to remember why any of it matters, I go watch a movie.
One of four things I have worked on. Click below to see the rest.
I spend time screening small molecules against cancer cell lines, trying to find compounds that kill cancer cells without touching the healthy ones. Most candidates fail. That is normal. The ones that do not fail are worth everything.
What I actually did
The three areas I spend most of my time in.
I am a chemist based in St. Louis working on cancer drug discovery at Washington University. I hold a chemistry degree from UMSL and have spent the last few years moving between academic labs and industry, always asking the same question: how do we make this faster and more purposeful?
I grew up in Nepal, where science felt like a way out and a way in. Out of limitation, and into a bigger world. I moved to the United States as an international student, navigating a new country and a new culture while trying to build something real. It was not easy. But the lab was always steady. Experiments do not care where you are from.
My undergraduate research at UMSL was on nanoporous gold. I synthesized it electrochemically, imaged it under electron microscopes, and thought about how it could carry drugs into the body. That work taught me to think in structures and surfaces, to understand that what a material does depends entirely on how it is put together at the smallest scale.
At Bayer, I moved into formulations for seed treatments. Industry science is about reproducibility above everything else. I built testing protocols, measured viscosity and particle size and pH, and learned that the difference between a good formulation and a bad one is mostly patience and precision.
Now at Washington University I screen small molecules against cancer cells. I run assays, read flow cytometry data, write Python scripts to process the results, and look for patterns. The wins are rare. When they happen they mean something.
I watch a lot of films. Mostly world cinema, Iranian, Korean, Hindi and English. I love movies that take their time and trust silence. There is something about a good film that does what a good experiment does. It shows us something we already knew but could not put into words. Cinema is how I decompress. It is also, I think, what keeps me curious in a way that is not just about data.
It started small. A film here, a film there. Then at some point it stopped being a hobby and became something closer to a practice. The kind of films that stay with us are not the loud ones. They are the ones that sit quietly in a corner of the mind and refuse to leave. That is what good cinema does. It does not explain. It just shows. And somehow that is enough.
Research and work across academia and industry, from nanomaterials to machine learning.
Screening small molecules against multiple cancer cell lines to find compounds that kill cancer cells selectively, without harming healthy ones. This is slow, careful, repetitive work. Most things fail. That is the job.
Synthesizing nanoporous gold and studying whether it could work as a scaffold for delivering drugs into the body. The material is interesting because its properties change depending on how you make it.
Standardizing seed treatment formulations so they behave consistently from one batch to the next. In industry, consistency is everything. A formulation that works differently on different days is not a formulation at all.
This is not something that has been done yet. It is something being worked toward. After getting a solid foundation in machine learning, the next step is to bring it into drug discovery in a way that actually makes the lab work smarter.
A full breakdown of what I can do, built across research labs and industry.
About anything. Research, films, or just saying hi.
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