We spent a lot of time in the wild. For me and my cousins, my siblings, we wanted to sight an elephant. The biggest thing we always wanted to see was a tiger. And one time we did see the tail of a tiger. We never got to see a tiger because, you know, camouflaged. They don't want to be seen by people and it's really hard to sight them and this was a game for us, you know. We really wanted to see all of these different wild animals.

And that is sort of what piqued my interest in biology, you know, in science. I grew up city called Coimbatore in India. Coimbatore is a beautiful city that is situated in between a lot of different forests. My dad really loved going outdoors. We didn't really live in the city. He didn't really like city life. So we lived in the outskirts, which made us very close to nature. We spent a lot of time in the wild taking pictures, but also just exploring all the beautiful jungles in southern India.

My name is Deepshika Ramanan, and I'm an assistant professor at the NOMIS Center for Immunology and Microbiopathogenesis at the Salk Institute.

I was sort of a nerd when I was a kid, which was different from other people in my family. No one in my family was into science or had a scientific background, but I loved biology.

When I was in sixth grade, I had a biology teacher who was also my class teacher, and she was my favorite teacher, and she really solidified my love for biology. And that's when I decided that I wanted to do this as a career. But when I was a teenager, I moved out of India and came to the US to pursue my bachelor's at Winona State University in Minnesota.

In Winona, I was exposed to biology in a completely different sense than what I had been exposed to in India. My project in college was working with the pet iguanas that we had in our biology department.

And we were sequencing the poop of these iguanas to look at what different microbes they were colonized with. And that is what started my interest in microbiology. As a postdoctoral fellow, I started focusing on the immune cells in the intestine, specifically a type of immune cells called regulatory T cells.

I found that the cells that do maintain protection or prevent inflammation in the intestine, known as regulatory T cells. These cells in the intestine were determined by the mothers. The mothers determined these cells by passing protective factors in their breast milk called antibodies.

What these antibodies did is they then shaped the microbes that were living in the intestine. And this then determined the levels of these protective immune cells.

The protective immune cells then determined later what the mothers were passing in their breast milk to the next generation.

When I interviewed at the Salk, I was just so amazed by how supportive and inquisitive this community is. Everybody was so excited about my science. I found that people were almost equally excited about my science as I was. And when I got the job offer to come start my lab at the Salk, it was a no brainer.

One thing that's very important to me in my lab is that it's a comfortable environment. I want people of different backgrounds, people that have had different training, people that have come from different walks of life, people that are in different stages of their career.

I want all of them to be able to work together, be comfortable with each other, and be comfortable asking questions, because the only way to move forward is by asking those questions.

My lab works on understanding how mothers can determine the immune systems of their children and their grandchildren. And how they can shape this immune system by passing protective factors in breast milk. This is something that is central to all mammals. We get breast milk or formula when we are born, and it is extremely important for us to know how getting these different factors in breast milk, or in formula can actually shape our immune system and shape the immune systems of our future generations. Better understanding of how mothers are protecting their children could help us prevent or even treat a lot of diseases in the future.