Sci.STORIES
How Dr. Ksenia Kuznetsova chose her scientific direction

Story by Dr. Ksenia Kuznetsova

For most of my life pre-uni, I had no idea what it meant to do science - it was something from movies and all the people in those white lab coats saving the world, neither was I your typical “collecting bugs” future scientist fate type of a kid. But I always felt that I enjoyed learning new things and I strived in interdisciplinary cross-functional environments where I could switch between topics.

Then, I was drawn to biology (...but also chemistry… and journalism… and languages and semiotics..). The ideal scenario in my head looked like every few years I can switch up and learn a new field or new discipline, which is hardly sustainable.

So, I went for gene technology after school, slowly learning what it means to do science - which seemed perfect because I could imagine myself switching projects (learned the hard way that usually one should stick to one or few to bring it to completion) and learning new things constantly.

In this frame of things, developmental biology felt like the mother of all (biological) sciences - I was fascinated that so many mechanisms and pathways are established in the early development and all the processes start anew - this seemed perfect as a study direction. When there is illness - often the mistakes in developmental pathways are manifesting - stem cells come from early tissues - regeneration is basically a developmental process re-switched at the “adult” tissue. We also had a really cool (though, slightly on the arrogant side) prof teaching us dev bio during our Bachelor's, but in my home country, I couldn’t find the Master's program that focused on dev bio. So I moved - exposing myself to more experts in this field and even meeting an author of the most famous developmental biology textbook.

I figured that I was not ready to part with an imagined scenario of learning more and trying to find out how I would feel if I did a project longer than a year, so I went on for a Ph.D. - a scientist life simulation - not necessarily because it made sense career-wise, but because it made sense in terms of suitable personal experiments. By that time I was certain that activation of the genome is one the most fascinating aspects of development - as you get from nothing to “life” in a robust and precise way. I applied to a lot of programs but was lucky enough to be selected for the lab that did exactly that (after a series of mishaps including a wrongly sent email that I didn’t pass the entrance exam and repeating the interview because the lab’s funding was on hold). But it worked out - and I did finalize the experiment of doing the project for 5 years. After this, I am very happy I’ve done it, realizing that I need to expand beyond a certain project for a prolonged period (even be it as exciting as the first transcriptional events in zebrafish ;)) and I am back to figuring out what’s next.     

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