Member Spotlight: Sheetal Ganesan

Name:

Title:

Senior Core Specialist

Year joined CDB:

2023

Can you say a few words about yourself and your role at Northwestern?

My name is Sheetal Ganesan. For a little under 3 years, I have been working as a Senior Sequencing Specialist in the NUSeq Core Facility. My work involves helping researchers within Northwestern and external academic and industrial clients plan and execute their Next Generation Sequencing experiments right from nucleic acid extraction to data delivery. I supervise a team of dynamic lab technicians to ensure we complete projects in a timely and efficient manner.

What is something people tend to misunderstand about your work?

One of the biggest misconceptions people have about my position is that most of my work is restricted to the scientific bench. The truth is that I wear multiple hats at work. While I do spend time at the bench, my responsibilities include problem-solving, troubleshooting and optimizing experimental workflows, managing and delegating projects to the core staff, as well as triaging between vendor support specialists and end-users to ensure that the core provides effective solutions for their research needs.

What is your favorite aspect of your work?

Between having a successful consultation with our end users and working with our wet lab team to successfully construct DNA libraries as well as manage the sequencing runs in the core, my work days look a lot like a game of Tetris. I often tell people that I enjoy solving puzzles and a big part of my job is troubleshooting. Being able to pinpoint where a sequencing run has gone wrong or what experimental method would be the best fit for our researchers is something that truly brings me joy at work.

What do you like to do when you aren’t in the lab/office?

I am a huge bookworm. You can always find me with my nose in a book outside of work.
I recently got back into running, and I just completed my first half marathon last month and have started training for my next one. I also enjoy biking, gardening, cooking.

If you could collaborate with (or meet) any scientist, living or deceased, who would it be and why?

I would really like to meet Rosalind Franklin. Her work in X-ray diffraction essentially paved the way for us to understand, visualize and analyze the double stranded helical DNA structure we are so familiar with today. As a scientist whose daily work life mainly revolves around these building blocks of the universe, I would truly like to meet Rosalind Franklin and not only thank her for her research but also show that her life’s work has resulted in the wonders of DNA sequencing that enables researchers across the globe make huge strides in disease diagnosis, understanding genetic mutations and advance research techniques.