Her Story
About Maya Dhani
Maya Patel is a Genetics and Genomics student at UC Davis with a double minor in medical humanities and Global Disease Biology. She has been working in genetic research in the biotech industry for the past 4 years. She currently serves as a Research Associate and Protein Engineer at a biotech startup focused on protein development to cure cancer. In this role she performs microbiology, molecular biology, protein expression, mutagenesis, and purification work. At UC Davis she has held leadership and research roles involving technology management, qualitative and quantitative research, literature analysis, and mentoring. Her experience is further complemented by healthcare outreach through SPARK Health and training in cancer genomics. Maya attributes her success to her parents' emphasis on learning by doing and finding joy through open-mindedness and hard work. She values equity highly, having written a paper on health equity, and plans to integrate it into global health, epidemiology, science, and research. Her advice to young women entering the field is to fail forward with introspection and to ensure passion for the work.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Maya Dhani
01What do you attribute your success to?
My parents both. Like, my father was very much, you learn by doing, and my mom always said that Joy finds you as long as you're looking for it. I think like, both of those things really made me believe that I could pick any field, and as long as I'm open-minded and hardworking, why core principles would translate into that, as long as that's what I'm looking for, and not just looking for money or success or anything like that.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Fail forward. Fail with introspection. I think a lot of times we think that we need to be firing in all directions, but we're not really thinking about why we're firing in those directions, what we're learning from those things. And when, especially when you're going into a field that requires long nights, lots of dedication, lots of schooling and hard work. Be introspective about what you're doing, even if it doesn't relate to, like, the field of study. Be introspective and understand it, because the worst thing you can do is graduate with a major in biochemistry or genetics, or to get into the workforce for my field and realize you have absolutely no passion for this at all.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I think what's challenging is understanding how limited our scope of knowledge is within cancer and biochemistry, because we can do something a million in time. And think we're fixing it, but at the end of the day, we don't know everything, and we won't always understand why things work and they don't work. I think what's challenging is staying motivated amidst Feeling like you're hitting a brick wall, because we're so ignorant in some of the more minor or microscopic aspects of science.
04What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Equity. I've written a paper on health equity. A lot of my classes I take, for my minor in health equity, I think that we need to understand that the world is such a complicated place, and everything comes back to creating and serving the community. That to me that's really important to me, and that's why, like, in my future plans to work in global health, it's really important that I want to integrate health equity into epidemiology, into science, into research, and to understand that, like, from a very foundational aspect, people are different, our genetics are very different, but that just means that we need to be more open-minded, not selective.
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