I am from Bangladesh, where I was born and brought up in a family striving to make a difference for the mental and intellectual betterment of children. My parents founded an institution for learning, teaching and practicing academic and extracurricular activities, working for children’s safety and rights and established a library. That wide range of involvement in literature, cultural and human rights activities taught me one thing: you have to think out of the box and get out of your comfort zone to make a big positive difference.

 Working with a lot of children and adults throughout the childhood and adolescence, the human psychology and psychiatry became a field of my deep curiosity and interest. During my years of studying Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery in Bangladesh, my thirst became unquenchable to find more about the role of genetics and environment in developing psychiatric disorders. I started to plan to go for a career in research, although it was not very conventional for the medical graduates of Bangladesh to go to the research track. After graduation, I went for fellowship training in Psychiatry in Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. That period helped me to practically realize the dire necessity of significant improvement in treatment and management systems for mental diseases, when I saw helpless patients returning to the hospital for ‘treatment’. To better equip myself for graduate studies, I volunteered in the Psychiatry and Early Neurobiological Development Laboratory at the University of Iowa. There, I participated in a project working on finding the role of placenta in insecticide-induced disruption of fetal growth and neurodevelopment.

 Getting accepted into the interdisciplinary PhD program in Human Toxicology, I believe, will provide me the long-cherished opportunity to pursue research on gene-environment interplay in development of psychiatric illnesses and their effective treatment.