Abhishek Garge

I had primarily joined this degree course so that I may carry out cutting-edge scientific research in the field of “Cancer Therapeutics”. My MSc Research Project entitled, “Apoptosis, Self-Eating or Burst? Molecular Mechanisms of Cancer Cell Death following Photodynamic Therapy (PDT)”, gave me an opportunity to carry out highly impact-full research pertaining to anti-cancer therapy. The research I have done for my MSc project has taught me a lot and I sincerely feel that in future this experience will improve my career prospects. My research work at Leeds helped in establishing Erythrosine-based PDT as an effective treatment for oral cancers, for the first time. I am eagerly looking forward to various peer-reviewed publications coming out of this project. Further, my ‘research poster’ partly based upon this MSc research project was presented at an International Symposium on ‘Cancer Drug Discovery, Development and Evaluation’ organised by British Association for Cancer Research (BACR) and European Association for Cancer Research (EACR) at University of Nottingham. I was one of only 17 researchers/students selected for poster presentation at this prestigious event. I actually ended up winning the prestigious “EACR/BACR First Prize” for the Best Poster at that symposium. In fact, the Graduate School of the Faculty of Biological Sciences has confirmed this to be a very rare achievement for any MSc Biosciences student. Frankly speaking, I am very proud of these accomplishments.
While doing this degree-course, I have made some wonderful friends and met some marvellous people (including some world renowned researchers). I had never experienced such an international & highly multicultural environment, before I came to Leeds and hence, this experience will always remain close to my heart.