Ritika Saxena, recipient of an Arrow Hawkesbury Canoe Classic PhD Scholarship, is excited to be on the home stretch of her third and final year of her PhD candidature.

Throughout Ritika’s PhD, she and her team of supervisors have been busy working on ways to generate blood stem cells in the lab that can potentially be used as therapy for people with blood cancers or bone marrow failures requiring a transplant. Their research aims to better understand how blood stem cells develop from their precursors and to improve the protocol used in the laboratory to generate these cells for therapy. The hope is that this work will one day address problems of both donor mismatch and donor shortages. Significant progress has been made with this research, with a publication expected to be made soon in a very prestigious journal. Hear more from Ritika on this research here:

Study time in Europe

For Ritika personally, her research has benefited this year from a 3-month long exchange program to Europe. First at the reNEW, University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and then at San Raffaele – Telethon Institute of Gene Therapy in Milan, Italy. Learning from her overseas colleagues and having access to world class facilities in Copenhagen has enabled Ritika to perform cutting edge techniques to better understand the spatial organisation of developing blood cells. Ritika’s time in Italy was extremely useful in generating a model to study endothelial to haematopoietic transition. Ritika was previously having trouble getting the blood precursors to grow at all, let alone grow into blood. But now with the help of these experiences in Europe she has been able to successfully take these precursor cells and grow them into blood! The next step is to conduct further experiments to refine this process even more.

The global opportunities for Ritika don’t stop there. Over the last year, Ritika added to her already impressive list of presentations of her work attending a number of local, national and international conferences including:

• Annual Scientific Meeting for reNEW in Copenhagen,
• Australasian Society for Stem Cell Research Annual (ASSCR) Meeting in Sydney
• Australian Society for Medical Research (ASMR) Student Symposium
• International Society for Experimental Hematology (ISEH) Annual Meeting in New York
• MCRI Stem Cell Medicine Symposium
• MCRI MCC RSA Student Symposium
• Pluripotent Stem Cell Derived Hematopoiesis Symposium (PSCDH) in conjunction with ISEH in New York
• WEHI Spatial Technology Symposium
• Australian Society for Medical Research (ASMR) Gala Dinner

Supporting younger scientists

And if that doesn’t sound like enough work, in addition to Ritika’s time in the lab, at conferences, working at reNEW and San Raffaele, and writing and submitting articles to peer reviewed academic journals, Ritika has continued her role as mentor for early career researchers and school students interested in careers in science. Ritika’s active involvement in this area shows that her desire to help others transcends from her laboratory research work and into the wider world of science and education.

This year Ritika joined the International Society for Experimental Hematology (ISEH) Diversity, Equity and Inclusion working group, an international committee. Ritika is passionate about this area and believes that academia can be more inclusive and diverse. She has also continued her involvement in the Stem Cell Conversations seminar series based out of the Centre for Stem Cell Systems, University of Melbourne, and UniSTEM, where high school students are offered a glimpse into the scientific world. Ritika loves the opportunity these programs provide to share her love of science with younger students. She also helps international students find a suitable PhD program, and shares tips for junior students to excel in their university lives through a passion project of hers on Instagram.

Ritika has a great team alongside her

In reflecting on her accomplishments this year, Ritika gives thanks to her supervisory team: “I am ever so grateful for the phenomenal supervisory team that guides me, at one of the best universities in the world, known globally for its expertise in stem cell research and blood development. I aspire to become a little bit like my supervisors every day.” Ritika’s research supervisors include her primary supervisor Prof Andrew Elefanty, who heads the Blood Development Group at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI), and co-supervisors Associate Prof Elizabeth Ng (co-leader of Blood Development group) and Prof Ed Stanley (group leader of Immune Development group at MCRI).

Ritika is nervous and excited as she embarks on the final stretch of her PhD candidacy. She thanks Arrow saying “I could not do it without Arrow’s support!” and the Hawkesbury Canoe Classic “for continuing to raise funds for Arrow that supports students like me.” Ritika’s top-up scholarship has helped supplement her income whilst she has dedicated her time to research and helped her afford what may seem like trivial, but nonetheless very important expenses such as an upgraded study desk and chair and second monitor where she will inevitably spend long nights, working from home as she completes her dissertation. Ritika says “This top up scholarship plays a crucial role in ensuring I can prioritise my PhD studies while avoiding part time work”.

Ritika has also enjoyed getting to know more about Arrow and the Arrow team, attending the Blood Conference with us in Melbourne, and our Annual General Meeting in Sydney. Ritika looks forward to supporting Arrow and the Hawkesbury Canoe Classic into the future, and we also look forward to our continuing relationship beyond her PhD.

Congratulations Ritika! We thank you for your hard work as a most worthy recipient of an Arrow PhD scholarship. We also would like to thank Ritika’s supervisory team for their support of her research, and also the Hawkesbury Canoe Classic Foundation for their generous donations each year which have made our PhD Scholarships possible.