Скачать или смотреть IBK How to Apply - Part 3, Dr. Deemah Dabbagh (2024)

Dr. Deemah Dabbagh speaks about her experiences beginning her IBK fellowship in Prof Brandon Dekosky's lab in the Ragon Institute at MIT researching novel antiviral strategies and gives advice to applicants.

Partial Transcript
Dr. Deemah Dabbagh:

Hi everyone, thanks for joining us today and I'm really happy to be here in this webinar.
Back home, I'm an Assistant Professor at the Department of Clinical Lab Sciences of King Saud University. Here at MIT, I'm working in the lab of Dr. Brandon DeKosky at the Ragon Institute which is a multi-institute research center that collaborates between MIT Mass General Hospital in Harvard. And, in the DeKosky Lab, what we do, it has a very immune engineering focus which is very interesting. What we do is we bioengineer antibodies that we get from patients and we try to make them better. We try to make them bind better to infectious agents like viruses for use as potential therapeutics.

My background was not bioengineering before coming to MIT. This is a very new field for me and it's part of what makes me very excited to be here. My background is virology with a focus in virus host interaction. So there is a bit of an overlap between my background and Dr. DeKosky's work, but still everything that I am doing in the lab and will be doing is pretty novel and exciting for me.

As to the second part of the question, what has inspired me to pursue a career in research?

I think it was my just being drawn to public health from a very early age which this is what made me start my career as a clinical lab scientist where I was diagnosing or helping in the diagnosis of different diseases by analyzing patient samples. And then very early after that, I realized that even though I was doing a meaningful contribution to public health by being a lab technologist, I really wanted to be more involved in finding solutions to public health challenges. This transitioned me to start my grad school journey. And it was really in grad school, specifically in my PhD program, where I developed this deep interest in novel antiviral strategies. My career in research really started with grad school. And I guess what keeps me going is knowing that I am part being part of a research that is helping to address or to find real world solutions to public health problems in any way.

Any advice for applying to the Ibn Khaldun Fellowship?

It was a pleasant experience overall. It was time consuming, but with good planning it was manageable. The application is long. Because it's long my advice is to start early, as early as possible. And actually, one of the most important things that I think you should start doing, is contact your referees as soon as possible. I would actually recommend that this is the first thing to do when you're starting the application. Just because you want to have this time buffer in case someone didn't get back to you or, someone didn't get back in time. That you have a plan B to contact someone else or you just give them sufficient time to write you a recommendation letter. Make sure to choose people who can speak to your abilities in research and who can speak to your suitability to the program. I feel like this is really important.

Another important thing is to also take your time in looking at the profiles of the faculty that you want to work with like the research profiles. Definitely read some of their recent publications just to get an idea of how you know how your goals align with the type of research that they're doing. This is something that you want to do also early on.

Start with these two things and then definitely give your time to go through the essays. I feel that the essays are a little similar to a PhD statement of purpose. So that was not really a very challenging thing just because I'm sure pretty sure that all the applicants here have experience with writing personal statements and also the IBK statements are very structured. Each one has a very specific question that you need to address. So, I feel like having them structured this way makes them less daunting than writing like a general personal statement.

The takeaway from all of this is start early. Make sure that you give your referees enough time to write you good letters and make sure that you choose suitable referees to write you the letters.

What has been the most challenging part of your MIT experience so far?

The most challenging experience or the most challenging part is just starting at a new place which happens every time you transition or start a new job. So this is something that it takes time to acclimate to a new work environment a new team. I think this is one of the big challenges. Another challenge is that I am joining a lab where a lot of the work, most of the work really, is very new to me. It's a very it's an entirely new field. That part is challenging, but it's also what makes my time here at MIT exciting because I'm learning new things.