Sabeeha Merchant

Abstract

If you had told young Sabeeha that she would become editorin-chief of The Plant Cell, the world's leading publication for the plant sciences, and work alongside Nobel prize winners at the University of California, Berkeley, she would have ignored you before turning back to reading her latest novel. Which is just as it should be, when you're 12. Truth be told, she might have dismissed any foretelling of an academic career in the sciences, and much of the path that led her to academia was paved by a series of fortunate events, not unlike the circumstances surrounding the rise of her laboratory's main focus of research to prominence, the unicellular green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. NO EARLY LOVE FOR BIOLOGY Sabeeha was born and raised in Mumbai, India (formerly called Bombay), then the second largest Indian city behind Kolkata (or Calcutta; https://www.hindustantimes.com/interactives/citiessince-1901/), where she and her younger brother had a very happy childhood. She did not express particular career aspirations as a child and dropped biology from her course load to avoid the associated and mandatory dissections of cockroaches, earthworms, and frogs. The topics of chemistry and mathematics fared much better in her eyes: Sabeeha considered the chemistry labs as being "much fun." While in high school, she and her classmates took the Indian School Certificate, which determined whether a student should specialize in the sciences or the humanities. Sabeeha showed aptitudes in both disciplines, but her mother and teachers agreed that she should be placed in the science track, which had fewer female students. At her mother's insistence, Sabeeha applied to college in Mumbai, even though she had no such ambitions. She secured her admission with some difficulty, despite her test scores, due to her gender and to the lack of scientists in her family (her father was a stockbroker, while her mother pursued volunteer activities and helped her father with work he brought home from the office). Luckily, Sabeeha's brother expressed an interest in pursuing engineering for college. The entire family then relocated to the small Wisconsin college town of Whitewater, population 12,000. Because she enjoyed chemistry the most, Sabeeha initially chose this subject as her major but quickly changed to molecular biology, a newly emerging field at the time. This meant (1) moving to the much larger University of Wisconsin, Madison and (2) catching up on all the biology she had skimped on as a child. On the plus side, she had already fulfilled the required courses in chemistry, physics, and calculus back in India.