Dr. Rohan Khadilkar is a principal investigator at Tata – ACTREC. He works to understand how the micro-environment around stem cells changes during development and disease conditions. Rohan is a 2024-2025 board member at InSDB.
Hello, Rohan. Let’s start from the beginning- why did you choose developmental biology as your field of research?
During my Bachelor’s and Master’s in Biotechnology, I was fascinated by the depth and breadth of various subjects in the syllabus. I always wondered how all this content entered the textbook, and what the process behind scientific discovery and knowledge creation must be. Questions such as these got me interested in the research aspect. I was always curious to learn how organisms develop, and how a single cell becomes complex living beings. How do patterns and biological structures emerge and thrive? I was naturally attracted to developmental biology. I remember watching a short movie of a beating heart in a mouse embryo at a scientific seminar by Prof. Maneesha Inamdar and that really got me excited about research, and particularly developmental biology. In my opinion, to understand disease biology, it is important to understand the intricacies of organismal development.
Right now, a lot of students and early career researchers are getting into this field. How do you envision the society’s role in advancing research and education in developmental biology?
The society can play an important role in popularizing developmental biology. The more developmental biology becomes mainstream and the more we spread awareness, the greater the overall interest in this field will be. Developmental biologists can contribute and help by conducting public seminars on various topics that fall under the realm of devbio and by holding simple science sessions at school and college levels that will highlight the importance of developmental biology. A basic concept of how a human embryo develops during pregnancy could be a fascinating topic to attract and engage people and demonstrate the importance of studying developmental biology.
Along with research, another important factor is outreach, and taking devbio to the public. How do you think InSDB can enhance its outreach and engagement with the broader scientific community and the public? Is there a specific initiative from somewhere that you think InSDB can take up?
I think InSDB should have outreach events and camps in rural areas. If there are dedicated funds that can be earmarked for outreach activities, each of the InSDB board members could potentially come up with outreach activities in rural areas in their home state and also visit various schools and colleges where they can introduce simple concepts in developmental biology through short seminars and/or demonstrate some cool devbio stuff to the kids. This will not only serve the purpose of outreach but will also popularize dev bio, increase awareness about research, and help in taking the InSDB into deeper pockets in India apart from the metro cities.
What goals or initiatives would you like to implement as a board member to promote networking among researchers in India?
There are a number of initiatives that can be implemented to promote networking among researchers:
- It would be nice to start monthly scientific seminars by InSDB members – one faculty and two students per month. This can be kept twice a month. The Q&A and discussion session after the talks can be kept informal so that discussions can happen during this time. It will also help in networking.
- The InSDB conference should have a social mixer on one of the days (one evening dedicated to it so that people meet each other and get to know each other).
- The database of members with their research keywords, expertise, links to publications, etc. should be accessible to all InSDB members so that if anyone is specifically looking for collaborations, resources, reagents, etc. they can easily do that via the InSDB website or database. This initiative will foster collaborations among researchers.
- Few members can team up periodically for outreach events that could be preplanned to take devbio to schools, colleges, and universities where the exposure is less. This will also involve active engagement and hence will improve the dialog between researchers.
Finally, why, according to you, should anyone become a member of InSDB?
InSDB is a great platform that brings together developmental biologists and devbio enthusiasts together. There are many cool activities that InSDB conducts like outreach activities, meetings/conferences, which benefit everyone in the field. It also provides a great platform to showcase your research to the community. With the new InSDB website, there are added advantages where you can advertise vacancies in the lab, network with like-minded colleagues, share resources and reagents through InSDB, collaborate and write grants/projects together, etc. Therefore, I feel being a part of this vibrant InSDB community really helps!
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You can connect with him here.
