Layla Katiraee
BIO
Staff Scientist in Consumable Product Development.
Twitter: @biochicaGMO
Layla Katiraee
“Being a mom is always hard, and I feel that all the information out there makes it particularly challenging.”
I finished my PhD in Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto in 2008. During grad school, I knew that finances would make having children extremely challenging. I wanted to have kids when things were more “settled”.
My desire for stability, and frankly for a working washer and dryer, made my career choice fairly straightforward: I decided to go into industry. Having seen my PI spend the bulk of his time grant-writing, academia didn’t seem like the right fit. My love for benchwork led me to a career in next generation sequencing product development. Although the term “R&D” lumps research and development together, the two are very different skills. Research has to think of ideas and have the courage to try them out. Development happens at the next phase, where feasible ideas are examined to see where they might fail, so that the product is built more robustly. Basically, my job consists of taking a sequencing product that has been shown to work under a given circumstance and condition, and to try to make it work under broader circumstances and conditions.
I’ve never regretted my choice of going into industry, even though it has tremendous challenges. Bringing my child to work, working from home, and travelling with my family are all things that I’ve done, and I appreciate the flexibility that my employers have offered to make these arrangements happen. Having had women managers and directors was also very helpful, because I could ask them questions about how they made their schedules work, from pumping schedules to maternity leave.
I took a 3 month maternity leave and by the time my leave was done, I was aching for work and happy to be back. I am extremely privileged to count on the support of a spouse who knows how important my career is to me, so he was very happy to stay at home or work part-time so he could care for our son.
Early on, I noted that it was important to my son that he know where I am. So it is a small family tradition that the first week of any new job, I bring him to my place of work so that he can see my desk and my lab. I feel that it grounds him and helps him envision what I do throughout the day. It allows him to see some of the cool equipment I get to work with, and his favorites have always been liquid handling robots. It also allows me to explain my work to him. When he was 5, I explained to him an experiment that I was working on that was failing repeatedly, and he suggested that perhaps the DNA I was working on was moldy!
Being a mom is always hard, and I feel that all the information out there makes it particularly challenging. There’s so much contradictory information on the smallest of details. My own journey to figure out what to feed my child led me to join forces with several other women and establish SciMoms. We’re an educational non-profit that seeks to answer questions that parents may have using established and reputable sources. I’ve had the opportunity to write on a huge variety of topics from gun-safety, to vaccine safety, and whether the arsenic in rice is harmful. I feel that this is one of the most valuable things that I’ve done as a scientist for my fellow parents. As a scientist in industry, I also feel that it is a way that I can give back to society.
My son dreams of being a roller coaster engineer. He knew that his mom was a scientist at a very early age and learned how to say “deoxyribonucleic acid” when he was 2. We visit science museums, read lots of books, and I do science experiments with his class. I feel that my career in science has contributed to his development and to his skills, and I can’t wait to see what he does in the future.