In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers share tales of persistence and beating the odds in order to pursue their scientific dreams.

Part 1: Determined to become an academic, Rajyashree Sen must take on a broken system to secure a spot in a PhD program in Vienna.

Rajyashree Sen is a neuroscientist and postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University. She holds a PhD in neuroscience and molecular biology from the University of Vienna (Austria), and a masters degree in Biotechnology from the University of Hyderabad (India). As a graduate student with Dr. Barry Dickson, Dr. Sen dissected the neuronal pathways for evasive walking in fruit-flies. Her research focused on a set of neurons, dubbed the moonwalker neurons, that constitute the key pathway for backward walking in flies. Her work has been tweeted by MC Hammer. Dr. Sen is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Dr. Richard Axel, where she investigates the neuronal basis of social memories in mice. When she is not in the lab, she does improv comedy. While science has taken her to interesting places in interesting brains, improv has taken her to the moon, hell, back and beyond.

Part 2: Josh Barber dreams of studying fish, but when his father goes to jail and his mother is diagnosed with breast cancer, he’s left to care for his nine younger siblings.

Josh is the Assistant Director of Aquatic Life at Columbia University where he oversees the well-being of various aquatic species in biomedical research. He's cohost of the Podcast "Gettin' Fishy With it" a podcast about fish in the wild, the hobby and the laboratory. His hobbies include improv comedy, ruining conversation flow with terrible puns, fishing, and fishing in his favorite videogame, World of Warcraft.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

In 2011, I was doing my Master's in Biotechnology in the University of Hyderabad in India. I have to say, I was a nerd. I wanted to be an academic and I really loved science, but India was fucking hard. The whole system is really like some kind of Hunger Games where the weak don't survive, and I was feeling weak. I was surrounded by all these hyper competitive people and I didn't really like that, because I'm a dreamer, FYI.

Rajyashree Sen shares her story at Caveat in New York, NY in July 2023. Photo by Zhen Qin.

So, this particular day, I was two days away from a semester exam and I was trying to cram this semester's worth of material in two days, because I hadn't studied. It was hot, because Hyderabad in summer is a hot, brutal month. The sweat dripped down my face. I wanted to get the hell out.

I had just called my parents in the middle of the night, bawling, and they'd said what they usually said, "It's not you, Rai, it's the system. It's the system." They were low‑key anarchists.

I hung up on them and then I was looking through the internet for some material for my exam. I came across this application call for a PhD program in Vienna. I knew this place because my cousin went there to do her PhD. The deadline was in 12 hours and I literally dropped everything, I don't know why, and applied on a limb.

Now, months passed and I never heard back. Honestly, it was a travesty of an application, so I was not expecting to hear back.

But, one day, I received this email from the ether, a woman I didn't know who had emailed me because she had seen that I was one of the 10 Indians who had been selected for this Vienna interview. She had this very specific question about getting an Austrian visa.

I didn’t know what she was talking about, but it turned out that I was selected for this interview a month‑and‑a‑half ago, but the interview invitation emails all came from this man named Christopher Robinson who I thought was a spammer, so I had been sending all his emails to the Spam inbox without opening them.

I was thrilled. I was excited because, in those days, Vienna BioCenter sponsored the entire trip to Vienna.

But here's the thing, I didn't have a passport. I don't know about here, but in India, it takes either 15 days or six months to get a passport. I needed to get to this interview in a month‑and‑a‑half and, according to math, I needed to get this passport in 15 days.

So, day after day, I'd queue up in front of the Secunderabad passport office at 4:00 AM, hoping to be one of the chosen ones, because they had this cap on the number of applicants they allowed for the 15‑day fast processing passport application. My turn never came.

I felt like Sisyphus walking back and forth to my campus and the passport office. Imagine a Sisyphus in high heels, and a soft‑spoken one. It was really triple whammy.

But then there were all these stalls around the passport office. In retrospect, they kind of looked really sketchy, but at the time they were very official‑looking. So one day, there was this man who came out of one of these stalls and introduced himself to me as somebody who worked for the passport office. He looked really busy, so I thought he was legit.

I went through some of my documents and photocopied a bunch of them, and I was like, “Man, finally, something's happening.” But it soon dawned on me that this is just a random dude who's trying to scam me.

This time, this time y'all, I decided to fight. And just to give you some background, he was, like, five times my size. My nose was on his chest and this giant man was standing, like, on my face. He was swaying and had these huge biceps. He's just looked at me and he was like, “You owe me money,” in broken Hindi, because his mother tongue is Telugu and my mother tongue is Bengali, and none of us can really speak fluent Hindi, but broken Hindi is all we got.

So, he looks at me and he's like, “You owe me money.”

I look at him and a part of my brain is like, “He's kind of big.” But I hear myself say, "You know what I know how to do? I know how to punch a man.”

I had two friends that day who were wiser and worldlier than me who pulled me away. I think this man laughed, and I think one of my friends actually paid him on my behalf and I never forgave him for doing that. But one thing was becoming really clear to me, that there was no way I'd get this passport from Hyderabad in 15 days, so I really thought I wouldn't be able to go.

So I called my parents in Calcutta, that's my hometown, and I told them everything. My dad, he freaked out. He was like, “You're killing me, right? You're killing me. You cannot queue up at sketchy neighborhoods at 4:00 AM and fight with somebody who's like five times their size.”

I get that. I had a few accidents in Hyderabad. That's a different story. I get that. Yeah, I get that.

But my mom, on the other hand, was this really positive, boisterous woman. She was badass. She broke all the rules all the time. She found loopholes and systems. So she told me, "There has to be a way you can get a passport in 15 days from Hyderabad. Just talk to your professors."

And I thought, "She knows not what she says. My professors are a bunch of useless intellectuals."

But it turns out she was kind of right. One of my professors, they're an ex‑student who worked for the Indian Civil Service. He helped me figure out my passport and I actually got my visa two days before I flew.

In Vienna, I was crushing the interview. I was on a roll. But midway through, I made a terrible mistake and my heart just sank. I just couldn't get my confidence back up. I just left the interview board almost on the verge of tears.

I went back to my hotel room crying and I call my parents. I said, “I fucked up.”

But my parents, on the other hand, they kept their sense of humor throughout the process. They told me that they loved me and that it didn't matter if I didn't make it to this PhD program, that I should walk in the snow and take some pictures. I should binge on some Mozart chocolates, maybe go to Belvedere Palace.

I remember feeling so grateful to have my parents, the kind of parents that were my parents.

But the next day, I found out they selected me for the program. I don't know why. I have no idea why, but it seems like they'd really liked me.

So, I got a position in the neuroscience lab and it really started my long career in neuroscience. I have to say my PhD went really well in 2017. I was wrapping it up. Three of my projects were done. Two of them were almost done. One was published. I had got rave reviews. I was getting really excited for my PhD defense, because I knew I'd crush it.

But three months before my PhD defense, I received this phone call from my mom. My mom was this really boisterous, positive woman, but she called crying. She said that my dad was really ill and she had to make some really hard medical decisions, and she couldn't think straight.

So, I postponed my defense and I flew back home the next morning. I remember this time when I went back home, I felt so close to my parents in a way that I hadn't felt in a long time. I noticed that, yeah, they were getting old. They're really getting old.

We watched a lot of movies together. We watched Run Lola Run five times in two weeks. And they came to say goodbye to me in the Kolkata International Airport. I remember saying goodbye at the international departure zone.

I was walking away to the security and I turned back. They were still standing behind those sliding glass doors. I was walking away to the security, they were getting smaller and smaller, then they were waving at me and they were smiling at me.

I remember thinking, “They think I'm so cool, it's almost embarrassing. They're so proud of me. That's kind of awkward.”

And I remember thinking when I saw my dad wave at me, “What if this is the last time I saw him?” And it was, because he died 15 days later and my mom died a year‑and-a‑half after he died, so that was really the last time I saw my parents together.

In 2019, I joined my postdoc lab. I moved to New York City. I started my postdoc at Columbia University. My postdoc advisor, Richard Axel, is a scientist I truly admire. He, in the 1990s, did an elegant set of experiments that really opened the door to understanding how the brain interprets the sense of smell, which won him the Nobel Prize in 2004.

In his lab, I try to understand how mice recognize each other through their sense of smell. My experiments are going really well. I may have a lab one day.

I also really love New York City. It's a city full of immigrants. It's a city full of dreamers. It's a city full of bohemian misfits, so I feel like the city and I get each other, you know? Sometimes, when I walk home from the lab, I walk by the Hudson. I look at this beautiful silhouette of the Manhattan skyline and think about my parents.

Thank you very much.

Part 2

I'm the oldest of ten kids. It often takes a lot of people aback, right, because it's not the olden days anymore. But it's my thing that I respond to people when they ask pressing questions, like, “Why don't you want kids?”

“Well, I'm the oldest of ten.”

“Why are you so annoyingly responsible?”

“I'm the oldest of ten.”

“Why did you guys move so much when you were young?”

“I'm the oldest of ten, and, also, we were running from the law.” More about that later.

I didn't know why we were moving so much as a kid, but I did know that I love science. I can credit my mother for fostering that love in me.

Josh Barber shares his story at Caveat in New York, NY in January 2025. Photo by Zhen Qin.

When I was six years old, she would take a break from giving birth to walk us down the street to find monarch butterfly caterpillars that were living on milkweed plants. We loved collecting them and we would keep them in these little plastic Kritter Keepers. It was my job every day to collect the milkweed and bring that back. We were just captivated by watching them eat and munch and grow and, eventually, climb to the top of the Kritter Keeper and hang from the top and, eventually, metamorphosize into a butterfly after that chrysalis. It was just amazing to see.

My real and true obsession came when my parents got me my first fish tank at the age of eight. That was where my true obsession was unleashed. He was my first fish named PD and I was just completely hooked, pun intended. Told you there’d be a pun.

I could not stop. I started memorizing the Dewey decimal system so I could make my way to all the libraries and know exactly where the fish books were. And since we moved a lot, there were so many more books to find.

I had this little journal where I would diagram fish setups, complete with pricing and sketches. When I got a little bit of money, I subscribed and got a membership to Tropical Fish Hobbyist Magazine and I would pore through the articles. This is real. I need help. I would pore through the articles just reading about all the species and from these experts in the field.

When the internet was invented, I never thought I would say that, I am proud to say that I ordered fish from AquaBid.com, which is like an eBay for fish.

When I was 11, the law did finally catch up with my dad, and he was taken away on charges of larceny. I was confused. My dad wasn't a scam artist, absconding with millions of dollars and taking us on lavish vacations or buying yachts. He was just a failing business owner who was trying to feed us.

But, you know, the American court system has always been known to be really good to black men and so he was out of the picture. He was our sole wage earner. In no time, we lost our house, we lost our belongings, we lost all of our family photos and storage, and we were on our own.

It was surprisingly easy for me to step up as a leader in my family, because, I don't know if you heard me at the top, but I am the oldest of ten. That meant that while mom was out looking for work, I was doing things like babysitting. I was teaching Lauren and Rachel how to read using this big reading homeschooling book that was completely tattered, but I had learned to read myself with it.

I changed diapers, I cooked meals and I did it all because, frankly, I was there. I was there to do it. No one else was going to. It was all going to be okay, because mom was there. She was our anchor in the storm and we can get through anything with her.

As they say, when God closes a door, he closes the window too and locks it and you get stuck inside.

Mom got her first breast cancer diagnosis. We were living in Minnesota in a homeless shelter with basically no semblance of healthcare. It did not take a long time until that cancer had moved to her bones and the prognosis was not looking good.

I had a lump in my throat all the time that just never went away. I just felt that I had to be optimistic. I had to be there for my anchor. I had to be there for mom. So I choked down those feelings and I focused on the present.

I think in times of despair, we oftentimes grasp for things that give us comfort. For me, it was reading my books and watching my fish grow. I envied them. They have such simple lives. They didn't have to worry about losing a parent.

That year, we moved across country to New Haven, Connecticut, from Minnesota to New Haven to a shelter there. And while mom couldn't leave the apartment much because she wasn't feeling well, we as kids discovered a local book bank that was connected with us.

There was this wonderful woman named Chris Alexander there, a wife of a Yale executive. She recognized our dire need and she set up a little touring program for my siblings. For me specifically, she knew I was a fish nerd and so she would collect all the fish books that came in. She would set them aside and not let anyone have them and then she would save them for me.

Josh Barber and his family. Photo courtesy of Josh Barber.

Josh Barber as a child. Photo courtesy of Josh Barber.

Josh Barber with his mom Lisa Ann Barber. Photo courtesy of Josh Barber.

These books were an escape for me. I could read about some distant lake in a faraway land with cool fish or some deep‑sea vents in the bottom of the ocean. I was just kind of transported there through learning about wildlife.

Then we would return home AND it was back to reality, back to helping mom out of bed, back to being a 13‑year‑old parent to nine kids.

I believed everything my mom said. I believed that she was going to get better. I believed that the raw juice diet she was consuming was going to purge the cancer from her frail body. I believed it right up until I found myself with all my siblings around her hospital bed, just weeping.

She was unresponsive, her eyes rolled back in her head. She struggled to breathe and I just watched her chest and begged for the next breath as she clung to the last threads of life.

I remember reaching down and telling her for the last time that I loved her, and then the doctors rushed in and ushered us out. That was it. The person who I relied on for everything was gone, and I lost my resolve.

My siblings were looking to me for guidance, but I didn't have a compass. I didn't have my anchor. I felt like a planet with no sun.

A glimmer of hope did come in the form of local families which took us in. My new family wrapped me in love and a good heaping of white privilege and made sure I got a good education. They even let me bring my menagerie of pets, and that was a big deal. Not everyone was cool with the prized pet snakes showing up at their door, but they were.

It's amazing how much someone can flourish when all their needs are met. I didn't have to focus on tutoring Jamie in math or getting Luke up into his high chair. I could be a kid again. I could go for a bike ride or go fishing or watch TV all day.

And don't get me wrong. I was still reeling from the death of my mom. I think I felt very guilty about not being responsible for my siblings anymore, but I could just exhale again. I could refocus on my love of science, my love of fish and focus on what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

In college, I was known as the Piranha Guy. Well, I was known as the Huge Afro Guy first, but then the Piranha Guy after that. After college, I found out that there was this whole field I never knew existed. Do you know that all around the globe there are laboratories that use fish in research and they need fish‑obsessed nerds like me to take care of them? I know now.

I'm 36 years old now. I'm still young. Thank you. 36 years young. As they said before, as Diana said before, I'm the associate director of Aquatic Life at Columbia University here in Manhattan. I will never lose my fascination with fish and my obsession with fish, but I no longer stare into the tank wishing I were them. Just as my job is to cultivate them and provide an environment wherein they can grow and flourish, I feel like the same has been done for me.

I am happy to say that I've also taken up the mantle of the anchor in my family. It's the role that I am the most proud of of any of my roles.

Thank you.