The stories between the experiments.

The life between diagnoses.

I graduated from high school at sixteen, despite spending a substantial part of my final year in hospital. My examination results kept me out of the medical school I had wanted to enter. The illness did not prevent graduation, but it changed what was possible afterwards. I eventually studied chemistry and built a life in research. I do not regard that as proof the illness was necessary or that losing medicine had been good fortune.

There were attacks when I could not keep down even water. Illness interrupted examinations and ordinary routines, while the clinical reports captured only part of what was happening. The rest belonged to the hours spent getting through each episode.

My records have used descriptions including eosinophilic gastroenteritis and hypereosinophilic syndrome. Investigations considered serious haematological disorders, later excluded. Long-term treatment brought complications of its own. These experiences shaped my educational history without defining the scientific work I went on to undertake.

When the COVID-19 lockdown began in 2020, I suffered another severe flare. Hospital access was disrupted, and concerns about the immune effects of glucocorticoids delayed my prescription. I spent fourteen days vomiting and waiting for it. Those two weeks were hell. Read the account of those two weeks ↗

In 2012 I wrote about the disease online. People continued finding me through that post years later. I now read the literature with different training, but I would still welcome a life in which eosinophils occupy less of my attention. I have other questions I want to investigate.

Read the longer bilingual story on this website ↗ · Read my original personal essay on Substack ↗

The chemistry chapter we built.

University taught me techniques and equations, but much of my education took place in the hours when other students were still willing to discuss a problem after a class had ended. Helping establish the American Chemical Society student chapter at Qatar University in 2015 was part of that experience. We wanted experiments, talks and scientific conversations to reach beyond the people already working in research groups.

Hosting the fifth Chemistry Festival meant preparing explanations for visitors who could ask almost anything. I had to know where a demonstration would lead, what it could show reliably and which questions required more than we could demonstrate on the day. That preparation was as important as speaking onstage.

Helping establish the ACS student chapter meant organizing events and bringing people into the conversation. The certificate I received later reminds me of the colleagues and students who made that work possible.

The guests were waiting. I was still at the microscope.

On the last day of that experiment, people had already gathered inside my house. They were waiting for me, and I had not arrived. I was still at Qatar University, occupied with the work that had taken over so much of that Ramadan. I remember the contrast more clearly than I remember the hour: one room prepared for a gathering, another room where the experiment was not yet finished.

The days before had acquired a routine of their own. We would break our fast at the university, then go back to the experiments. On those evenings we missed Taraweeh prayers because we were still working. That detail matters to the memory. Ramadan is not an ordinary month with a meal shifted to sunset; its evenings have a rhythm of prayer, companionship and obligations to people. We were making choices about that time, not moving through an empty calendar.

Those evenings were connected with our work on endothelial primary cilia in the developing cerebral vasculature of zebrafish. We were studying where the cilia appeared as the vascular network developed, how their distribution related to blood flow and what happened to the vessels when the cilia were disrupted. Examining such small structures required careful microscopy and equally careful interpretation of what a change in an image might mean.

On the final experimental day, I stayed at the microscope past the time I was expected home. I was reluctant to leave the session unfinished, although I knew guests were waiting for me. Earlier in Ramadan we had returned to experiments after iftar and missed Taraweeh prayers. I remember the unfinished work and the people I had kept waiting; the two occupied my thoughts throughout that evening.

The gathering at home had been planned, so my lateness affected other people. I remember wanting to finish the microscopy and knowing how much of the evening had already gone. The research eventually appeared in a paper; the hours I had taken from Ramadan gatherings and prayers were part of the experience that never appeared in its methods section.

Our collaborative study of endothelial cilia during zebrafish cerebral-vascular development was published in 2018 in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology (ATVB). The figures grew out of long sessions examining the developing vessels. Reading the paper now brings back the evenings when I was absorbed in the images and reluctant to leave the microscope.

Before the laboratory: The Youth Company.

Some of my oldest photographs are from working with The Youth Company. I helped with breast-cancer awareness activities and the Youth Change Everything conference while I was still a student. Those events introduced me to the demands of communicating health information outside a classroom.

At those outreach events I learned that a question which seems elementary to a scientist may be urgent to the person asking it. The photographs record my participation in public-awareness work and the encounters that drew me toward more sustained scientific communication and teaching.

A Series of Unfortunate Trials.

My friends and I were working on different copolymers. Each of us had a material of our own to investigate, so even when we were sharing a laboratory and comparing notes, we were not quite performing the same experiment. Mine developed an especially stubborn problem: the polymer appeared to have become crosslinked, and it would not dissolve the way I had expected. I repeated the attempts, changed what I could, and watched the same basic difficulty return. Eventually I gave the notebook a title: A Series of Unfortunate Trials.

The solubility problem led me to think about polymer architecture. A diblock copolymer joins two different polymer segments; in a selective solvent it may form micelles, depending on the chemistry of the blocks and their compatibility with the medium. A covalently crosslinked network behaves differently because its chains cannot separate freely. Such a material may swell without dissolving. I suspected that my sample had formed a network, but failed dissolution alone could not distinguish crosslinking from aggregation, crystallinity or poor solvent compatibility.

At the time I suspected unwanted crosslinking. A failed dissolution attempt, however, cannot establish a covalent network: solvent compatibility, aggregation, crystallinity or other material changes remain possible explanations. Distinguishing them would have required systematic solvent extraction and swelling measurements alongside appropriate chemical characterization. The notebook preserves the observation and my hypothesis, not a confirmed mechanism.

What I remember most clearly is the contrast between my work and that of my friends. We had been assigned different copolymer systems, and that made the conversations about our results particularly vivid. Chemistry was no longer the tidy movement from a reaction scheme to a product. Two materials belonging to the same broad family could behave differently for reasons hidden in their molecular architecture or preparation. The experiment that would not cooperate demanded more thinking, not less.

I wrote “A Series of Unfortunate Trials” on the notebook after several attempts to dissolve the material had failed. The title was a joke about repeated failures, but I still needed to record the attempts and work out what to test next. I did not identify a crosslinked structure from those attempts. What I had was an insoluble sample, an explanation I suspected, and more characterization to do.

Sometimes the surface is the experiment.

My work across polymeric materials, electrospinning and plasma surface modification made one distinction increasingly important: the bulk chemistry of a material is not necessarily the chemistry that the cell, the liquid or the surrounding environment encounters. Fibres change geometry and accessible area. Plasma processing can change the outermost surface chemistry. Neither technique can be understood from its name alone; preparation conditions and characterization decide what was actually produced.

The archived scanning-electron microscopy figure of PLA morphology shown below is part of that research world. It invites close looking but not conclusions unsupported by its original controls. I see a continuity between this work and drug delivery, although a modified polymer surface is not an inhaled vesicle. In both, the material eventually has to meet something more complicated than the assumptions under which it was designed.

Two materials. No section.مادتان لم تصبحا قالبًا واحدًا.

The ring that never closed.

The scheme ended with an imidazopyridine. Our 2018 QNRF Undergraduate Research Experience Program proposal was built around making substituted members of that family and examining their biological activity. I joined the team as an undergraduate chemistry researcher. There were two synthesis routes in the plan, with the expected products to be characterized before biological evaluation. By the time we completed the final report in 2021, we had to record that the intended imidazopyridines had not been obtained by the proposed route.

What we could isolate and investigate were imines, commonly called Schiff bases. The final report describes three such compounds and their spectroscopic characterization. They had initially occupied an intermediate position in the chemistry, but they presented questions of their own. We began examining how they responded to anions, particularly cyanide, using colour and spectroscopy instead of treating the unsuccessful ring closure as the end of the work.

One experiment gave a particularly visible answer. A yellow sensor solution shifted toward orange when cyanide was added under the conditions recorded in the report. In the UV–visible spectrum, the band near 380 nm diminished as a new band near 450 nm grew. The reported detection limit for that sensor was 1.42 × 10⁻⁵ M. Other Schiff-base compounds gave different responses to cyanide and hydroxide. Those differences mattered: a striking colour in a test tube was a useful starting observation, but it did not by itself establish selectivity or performance in an environmental sample.

The proposal had also envisaged biological evaluation. Colleagues in the biology team investigated compounds designated CMP5 and CMPB in triple-negative breast-cancer cell lines. The final report describes stronger effects of CMP5 than CMPB in several cell proliferation and migration experiments. Its measurements of SURVIVIN and c-MYC transcripts made the picture more complicated. In some treated cells, c-MYC expression increased when a reduction had been expected. Some gene-expression comparisons were not statistically significant under the reported analysis. These were in vitro experiments; they did not establish direct PRMT5 target engagement or the efficacy of a cancer treatment.

Then laboratory access became another experimental constraint. COVID-19 restrictions interrupted the later work, and the planned protein-level follow-up, including comparison with Western blot measurements, was not completed. The final document therefore contains something more complicated than an unsuccessful reaction scheme followed by a new success: it contains measurable chemical behaviour, exploratory cellular effects and mechanistic questions that were still unanswered when the project ended.

Our original proposal treated the Schiff bases as intermediates on the route to imidazopyridines. We could not complete the intended ring closure, but we isolated imines whose spectra and anion responses we could characterize. By the final report, those measurements occupied more space than the intended products. The change in direction was forced by the results: the chemistry we had actually achieved was more interesting to investigate than another account of the product we had failed to make.