Discovering Curiosity: How Parenthood Informed Priya Shah’s Fundamental Virology Research
After the birth of her second child in February 2017, Priya Shah took some time off from her postdoctoral lab work in fundamental virology at UC San Francisco. Shah, who earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from UC Berkeley, spent about eight weeks at home with her newborn son. Not only was it an important time for the burgeoning relationship between mother and child, it was an important time for Shah’s science. Between the busy tasks of childrearing, she found time to comb through papers recently published in her field.
“If I hadn’t taken time from the lab to take care of my newborn, I wouldn’t have had the time to actually do the reading and reflect on what are the most interesting directions to take my research,” said Shah, now an assistant professor who holds joint appointments in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics. “I would have been in the lab, doing experiments that I thought might get me a quick answer as opposed to really digging into the literature and finding something very unique.”