Sudha Pandalai, NIOSH medical officer, on her career path: transcript

Key points

• She became interested in molecular biology and lab research, and her first attempt at culturing rat brain cells failed.
• While in medical school she tried neurosurgery, but a patient with severe head trauma who could not be saved made her rethink her path.
• That experience led her to occupational medicine and a career as a physician in public service.
• She feels privileged because her work can help people before they develop an illness or injury.
• She enjoys visiting workplaces and talking with workers about the tasks they do.
• Her advice to students is to study hard now, keep good habits with family and friends, and eat vegetables.

Chapters

1. 0:01Early lab research and a failed rat brain culture
2. 1:04From neurosurgery to occupational medicine
3. 2:05Preventive work and visiting workplaces
4. 2:47Advice for students

Full transcript

0:01I had always been interested in biology, and I decided to study a little bit more specialized area of biology called molecular biology, so I got the chance to do that, and I got introduced to basic laboratory research. I thought it'd be really cool to take primary rat brain culture and culture it, but what I didn't realize is that the rat brain is so tiny that there's not a lot there to begin with, volume-wise, and so in the processing of culturing it, you lose so much that it's so that you just have nothing to culture and when I tried it the first time and

1:04told my advisor I did it he said why did you do that? I felt really stupid. While I was in medical school still feeling that I wanted to do something that had to do with the nervous system I decided to try neurosurgery. I was dealing with a patient who'd had this severe head trauma, and I knew I wasn't going to be able to save him. I knew our team wasn't going to be able to say him. Really made me start thinking about what I wanted to do as a physician. And that was the beginning of the thought process that led me here and to my current work in occupational medicine. I never in my life thought I would be able to be a physician in public service. And I think that's a really cool thing for me.

2:05I feel very, very privileged to be able to do this job. The work I do has the potential to impact many people, and it has the potential to impact them at a point in their lives before they've gotten some sort of illness or injury. I like music a lot, and I like stories, so I like movies, theater, dramas, that kind of thing.

2:47I like it when I go to a plant and somebody says to me, hey doc, why don't you look at my widget, process, activity, bench top, because this is what I do. And I'll say to them, does that hurt your elbow? And they'll be like, oh yeah. And they'll be like, no, it doesn't. And then I'll hear more about that. Study really hard right now. The stuff that you learn in elementary school, in junior high, in high school, that's when your brain is a steel trap. What you learn then stays with you the rest of your life, so learn it now. The second, learn the habits of spending good time with your family and friends and having some activities that you can do away from studying, because those will also stay with you, those habits will stay with you the rest of your life. And third, eat your veggies because they are brain food and your mom and dad are right or

3:51your grandparents or whoever it is is telling you to eat your veggies.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Science Speaks - Talking to Women in Science (Sudha, Medical Officer).webm by National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (2013-11-04), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.