Ramisa Fariha (she/her) grew up watching wrestling with her brothers. She lived in Bangladesh, didn’t have any scientists in her family, and was hopelessly in love with WWE wrestler Dave Bautista.
In seventh grade, she read Bautista’s memoir, in which he recounted his ex-wife’s struggle with ovarian cancer. Fariha went down a rabbit hole of research: What is this disease? What causes it? What are the possible treatments?
Soon after, she told her parents that she wanted to be a scientist when she grew up — a biomedical engineer. “I’m going to create the world’s first implantable human artificial ovary. And I will work with this scientist named Jeff Morgan at Brown University.”
“My parents were like, ‘Wait, what’s a Brown University?’” she recalled, laughing.
Her predictions came true: She went on to get a master’s degree in biomedical engineering at Brown with Morgan as her co-advisor, then earned a Ph.D. She’s proved herself so versatile as a scientist — having studied stem cell growth, breast cancer tissue imaging, and liquid chromatography mass spectrometry methods for analyzing things like dried blood spots — that she was hired for her current postdoctoral position at a new RNA center at Brown without having any experience in working with RNA on her resume.
Women’s health is still foremost in Fariha’s mind: She hopes to use her background in detecting biomolecules to develop low-cost, accessible diagnostics for polycystic ovarian syndrome and ovarian cancer.
And she still dreams of some day, when she’s a principal investigator, perhaps having a side project on artificial ovaries.
— Brittany Trang
