Early inquisitiveness metamorphosed a Kashmiri girl into an expert in molecular biology research at Indiana, USA. Meet Humaira Gowher who is making Kashmir Proud Worldwide. Humaira was born and raised in Srinagar until she was 19.
She was among the first few batches to attend Caset Experimental School, headed by Prof C. L. Vishen, a visionary and an exceptional educationist. It was through discussions about inventions and discoveries in Vishen’s classroom, she treasured the feeling of becoming a scientist.
She is graduated with Bachelors (Hons) and Master’s degree in Biochemistry from Aligarh Muslim University.She completed her PhD degree in Biochemistry from IISc and done her PhD thesis work in Germany in the Department of Biochemistry, at Justus Liebig University. She was awarded Summa Cum laude (Award of Excellence) for publishing 7 first author peer-reviewed manuscripts during that time.
While making marks on every step of scientific career, she has been appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the Purdue University. In the same course of time she set up her own Laboratory and working as an independent researcher.Few things she discovered had more impact on the scientific world than others. During her PhD, her work was the first to show that the short catalytic domain of the mammalian DNA methyltransferases Dnmt3a and 3b are active without their large N-terminal part, which led to characterization, crystallization, and many studies of those enzymes by theirs and multiple other labs around the world. Her current lab continues to work on understanding the regulatory potential of those enzymes during development and in cancer. During her postdoc, her work on the regulatory elements of the genome called insulators was indeed very exciting given that these elements can control the expression of genes that are megabases away from them. It introduced her to the field of chromatin folding and architecture and its role in the regulation of gene expression, which she continues to work on.
She advises, “If excelling is what you work toward, it is enough to advance you towards your goals.”
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