Scientist spans cultures, scientific disciplines

“It’s hard to put into words how I feel,” says Nita Sahai, an assistant professor in geochemistry, who grew up in Bombay, India.

Sahai, who likens her story to that of the classic immigrant trying to assimilate into a new culture, has been performing a balancing act between two cultural identities among three scientific disciplines ever since arriving at UW–Madison two years ago.

“I have lived in the United States for over 12 years,” she says, “and I have only recently become aware that I am, in fact, a “minority.'”

Though Sahai is referring to her dual identity as Indian and American, the same can be said of her professional identity. A member of a newly emerging field that integrates biology, chemistry and geology, Sahai is trying to bring together the different perspectives of the disciplines she studies.

Sahai grew up in India, but her upbringing was based on Western culture. “I listened to American pop music, spoke English at home, had all my education in English and didn’t wear the traditional Indian clothing all the time — maybe once or twice a month,” she recalls.

She decided to leave her native country soon after she started studying geology in college. “I knew I would have to leave India for graduate school and for my career. There are no resources for geology back there,” she says.

While she could have gone to Europe, she says she chose the United States because it offered opportunities for professional growth and the freedom to be herself.

Because she grew up in a Westernized environment, Sahai says that when she arrived in the United States she never expected to deal with issues of assimilation. “And I didn’t for the first 10 years I was in America, when I lived on the East Coast,” she says. “It just never came up.”

Now, however, she must work to keep her two identities balanced. “It is difficult to not appear different here in the Midwest,” she says, “when things such as skin color and Indian clothes are so obviously different.”

As Sahai walks the tightrope of cultural identity, she balances three scientific fields — a task she finds equally challenging — in a new field called medical mineralogy or, as Sahai more precisely defines it, medical geochemistry.

Although minerals have contributed to human health problems for years — researchers found inhaled soot particles containing minerals in the lung tissue from the Tyrolean Iceman, which is more than 5,000 years old — geologists and biologists haven’t combined their scientific perspectives until recently.

Sahai’s field combines these two areas, plus chemistry, to understand how the physical and chemical properties of minerals interact with organic matter, such as cellular membranes or proteins. These interactions can have positive and negative effects on organisms.

Sahai is collaborating with researchers at Harvard Medical School to identify the protein involved in the growth of bone-apatite, the mineral from which bone is made. “The findings,” she says, “could have implications for treating osteoporosis, healing bone fractures and designing orthopedic implants.”

Despite the significance of such work, Sahai faces challenges similar to the ones she encounters culturally. “It’s a hard thing being between big fields,” she explains.

To this day, few geology and biology conferences host panel discussions on medical mineralogy, Sahai notes, and many of the scientific journals in each field are reluctant to accept papers on the interdisciplinary topic. One of Sahai’s papers, which discussed interactions between cellular membranes and specific minerals, was rejected by a geochemistry journal in which she is regularly published “on the grounds of not being “geochemical enough,'” she says.

But there was a silver lining. She submitted the paper to a broader chemistry journal, where it was accepted.

Sahai says the reluctance among scientific disciplines to combine their perspectives is like the parable of the six blind men and the elephant. “Only by combining perspectives were the blind men able to figure out what the animal actually was,” she notes.

For Sahai, the moral of this parable applies not just to her professional life, but also to her personal one. “I think my double identity has enabled me to feel comfortable in just about any setting,” she says. “I’m able to appreciate the value of other people’s perspectives.”

These benefits that Sahai gains from her multicultural, as well as multidisciplinary, identity are what enable her to persevere.

“The balancing act is a fantastic opportunity for self-discovery and growth, which build on core humanistic values. The same opportunities present themselves at the borders of traditionally defined fields,” she says.

“These opportunities are what keep life interesting for me — and the ability to work with bright, motivated graduate students like the ones in my research group.”