Author: @Bea

I decided to be a Traces.Dreams ambassador because I meet many great people and it is a great opportunity to highlight some of the research topics that have potential for making a change.

I am going to share stories about people, films, and projects that inspire me and help other people in various ways.
I am specializing in the anthropology of religious art and visual representations.

I am a social anthropology PhD with visual media candidate at the University of Manchester. My research is a study of a sub-cultural groups in Kuwait who create rites that enable them to serve the cause of Ahl Al-Bayt within their community, nationally and transnationally with other Shi‘a elsewhere, while striving to maintain their connection with their religious history and to keep certain traditions alive through new forms of adaptations. More specifically, I focused on pious Shi‘a artists and their religious work in Kuwait. This work is based on one year ethnographic research in Kuwait in 2015. Most academic work on Shi‘a are on people who are politically charged or live in an unstable political environments. This, coupled with mainstream media representation of Shi‘a, provide unbalanced perspectives of Shi‘a who live elsewhere. Therefore, my research provide an alternative narrative of Shi‘a who live in a stable and rich country.

Further to my ethnographic research experience, I did a two years masters in visual culture studies at the Australian National University. Also, I did ethnographic research for nine months with an aboriginal center in Canberra and focused on the challenges of higher education among Australian aboriginal students.

In addition to my academic work, I am a photographer and filmmaker who worked in producing and directing various short narrative and documentary films. My last work before taking a break to focus on PhD is called Hijabi Girls which went to many film festivals around the world including Cannes film corner. It was also featured on BBC three website and shown on TV as part of a documentary called Through Your Lens in 2015 about emerging filmmakers in the UK.

I have decided to be a Traces.Dreams ambassador because there is an army of young scientists over there, hidden by the walls of labs and offices, working to make our world a better place, and I truly believe they deserve more visibility.

Therefore, I am going to share the stories of the future generation of scientists, their dreams and their passions.

The focus of my PhD project was mainly medicinal chemistry. More specifically, I tried to understand how, on a molecular level, an enzyme extracted from the cotton plant can produce its products. More specifically, I tried to see how can these enzymes can make different products, and see how their pathways can be modified to make new useful drugs.

The final aim of the project, which is still ongoing with plenty of PhD students and Postdoc working on it, is to get a full understand of these enzymes, and being able to engineer them so they can make the medicines we need, in just minutes. This is a new way to do medicinal chemistry, but I believe this field is shifting towards this new approach. The traditional idea of a chemist spending days if not months in the lab to produce medicines is slowing fading away.

Nature has always been smarter than us, and it provided the world already these little drug-like making machines which could potentially do in minutes what a human chemist can do in days. We just need to understand how they do that! Where do I see myself in 10 years? Oh, who knows! My biggest motivation in life, for how naïve it sounds, is to improve people’s life or at least try. I studied Pharmacy so I could help people getting the right medicines and cure, I did a PhD in chemistry so I could try to discover a faster way to produce medicines.

And now I work for a company that helps the communication between Doctors and Patients so that a better service and healthcare is provided because everyone deserves a good efficient care. The future? We will see! I need to thank my dad for my journey so far. He is the best GP I have ever met, always there for the people, nights, bank holidays, did not really matter. He was more a friend than a doctor to his patients, and even now that he is in retirement, people keep knocking at his door for advice. I would like to become like him, admired not for his success, but for the good he did. and keeps doing, to the world.