Resilience and representation in research: In conversation with Reeteka Sud

According to the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE), nearly half of India’s higher education student enrolment is composed of women. Yet, this picture changes sharply as one looks at who teaches, leads, and shapes research agendas in the country. A 2024 report by BiasWatchIndia shows that only around 16% of faculty positions across Indian institutions are held by women. This attrition in women researchers as they move higher up the career ladder is referred to as the ​“leaky pipeline. Perhaps it is time to change that narrative – instead of continuing to plug the leaks temporarily, we should turn our attention towards the structural workings of the pipeline itself. 

Reeteka Sud, Senior Scientist at the Centre for Brain and Mind (CBM) within National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru, and one of the foundational members of POWERBio, embodies this call for a systemic shift in how the academic ecosystem is shaped. Reeteka’s professional journey has evolved alongside her growing understanding of how academic systems work, and, more often, how they don’t. Rather than unfolding along a conventional, linear timeline, her professional journey has been shaped by curiosity, choice, and a desire for change — that reflects the persistence and resolve required to build a career in academia as a woman. 

Charting a career through reflection and choice

Reeteka pursued a PhD focused on chronic pain, trying to understand why the same treatments work for some people but not for others. This central question continues to shape her research even today, though the focus has shifted to mental illnesses: why might different people with the same psychiatric diagnosis respond differently to the same treatment?

Between then and now, she says, it’s been quite a journey. When she returned to India after her postdoctoral training in 2014, family and health emergencies made it impossible to continue research immediately. ​“It was a whirlwind”, she recalls, ​“and I was just trying to make the best of the cards I was dealt”. When she was able to resume work, she began teaching, but research was never far from her mind. ​“I would always try to bring research-based thinking into the classroom”, she says.

“I love doing research. There’s really nothing else I would rather do”, she adds. ​“So when this position at NIMHANS opened up, it felt like I could finally scratch that itch”. She re-entered active research in 2017 and has been at NIMHANS ever since. Now, as a Senior Scientist at the Centre for Brain and Mind (CBM), she describes her role as one that lets her work closely with a deeply interdisciplinary group. ​“CBM is a collaborative venture — clinicians and scientists with different kinds of expertise coming together to understand severe mental illness”, she says. ​“It’s a fantastic place to work”.

She also feels strongly that scientists have a responsibility beyond the lab. ​“I’ve always believed scientists have an obligation towards society at large”, she says, describing how this conviction led her to join other researchers during the pandemic to form the Indian Scientists’ Response to CoViD-19 (ISRC) and contribute popular science articles that made research accessible to wider audiences. Looking back, she feels these experiences have shaped her career in unexpected ways.

“These different experiences”, she believes, ​“have enriched my science, giving me new collaborators, perspectives, and ideas. For instance, one of the grants we’re currently working on focuses on incorporating the voices of people with lived experience (of mental illnesses) into genomics research”.

But academia doesn’t always see it that way. Time taken away from formal academic work is frequently viewed as a weakness, rather than a necessary path towards growth, reinforcing the [flawed] idea that only uninterrupted career trajectories are legitimate. While institutions claim to account for career breaks on paper, she has found that in practice, this consideration is applied inconsistently, and often subjectively.

Systemic changes, not individual solutions

The academic structure can be rigid and challenging to navigate. Reeteka points out that while some people manage to navigate this systemic rigidity of academia with strong personal support systems or helpful mentors, access to such support structures is uneven. She advocates building better systems, making it less bureaucratic. 

The burden of this rigid system falls disproportionately on women, who are constantly reminded that their gender shapes how their commitment and competence are judged — particularly when navigating caregiving responsibilities, career breaks, or flexible work arrangements.. ​“We keep telling women to plan better or prepare differently”, she says. ​“That itself is part of the problem”.

It’s not fair to expect women to find individual solutions to structural inequities”, Reeteka says. ​“Why don’t all research institutes have crèches, childcare facilities, or flexible re-entry options”? she asks. ​“A career break — for any reason — shouldn’t define a woman’s career trajectory. But it often does”.

Even today, Reeteka sees many female PhD students tussling with the pressure to conform to societal norms, including pressure from families to get married. Societal attitudes may take longer to change, but facilitating better systems within academia can ensure that such pressures don’t derail women’s careers. 

The quiet work of mentorship

When institutional structures fall short, mentorship becomes even more crucial. Early-career researchers must navigate complex decisions about collaborations, and these choices are shaped not only by scientific interest, but also by funding structures, geography, and access to infrastructure.

Reeteka considers herself fortunate to have had multiple mentors throughout her career. ​“Even if someone couldn’t help directly, they’d point me to others who could”, she says. During her postdoctoral work, her mentor Gerard Schellenberg, Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, played a key role in shaping her own philosophy as a supervisor. She shares that while he had an incredible grasp of fundamentals, what struck her even more was how he handled people. 

Science is hard, but working with people is harder. Most problems in the lab are people problems. The way he resolved conflicts, ensuring no one felt bulldozed, letting everyone feel heard, and calmly highlighting misunderstandings, was something I really admired”, she reminisces, adding that this is something she aspires to.

For Reeteka, working alongside clinician-scientists in CBM has been especially valuable. Biju Viswanath, the Clinical-Basic Science Coordinator and her immediate supervisor, is her first call for navigating internal processes, identifying collaborators, or assessing whether an idea is fundable. ​“He has been an incredible support over the years.” Reeteka also adds, the structure of research collectives like CBM might facilitate more impactful research, collaboration,and mentorship, compared to the conventional PI-centric academic models. 

Within POWERBio, Vidita Vaidya has helped her transform early, amorphous ideas into grant-ready proposals. Mentorship also involves guiding your trainees to think like a reviewer, a perspective that only evolves with time and guidance.. ​“When you write a grant, or you’re building your project, the ideas are close to your heart”, she says. ​“Switching roles and critiquing them objectively doesn’t come naturally to anyone”, Reeteka reflects. Clarity emerges through iterations. When you reach a point where someone can read the proposal and understand exactly what is being said – that’s the difference between an idea and a fundable grant for Reeteka. 

Now a mentor herself, Reeteka is acutely aware that science is never detached from culture. ​“None of us leave our family or cultural baggage at the door.The way your thinking has been shaped over the years shows up at your work”, she says. This awareness shapes her mentoring style, especially with women students who often internalise perfectionism and self-doubt. Helping her students not to be so hard on themselves is a big part of mentorship for Reeteka. 

Individual experience to collective action

It was this shared, often unspoken experience that eventually brought Reeteka together with other women scientists to form POWERBio. Unlike physics or mathematics, biology has thus far lacked a professional women’s network. 

“For women scientists, your experience as a woman and as a scientist can’t really be separated”, Reeteka says. ​“There are struggles that are hard to explain, even to people who mean well, because they haven’t lived them”.

Years of living with an inner voice repeating ​“it’s probably me” can take a quiet toll. ​“Having a community where you don’t need to explain, where someone just says, ​“I know exactly what you mean”, makes a huge difference”, Reeteka says. POWERBio aims to create a space built on understanding and solidarity for women in biology, and Reeteka believes that this will help the future generations of women researchers. 

POWERBio, has metaphorically just built its first floor. Alongside plans to register POWERBio as a society, the group is also focused on mainstreaming conversations on systemic barriers faced by women in biology. An ongoing effort has been to create a space within meetings at members’ institutions to discuss what POWERBio is, issues faced by women, and how these concerns might be addressed; even this is not always welcomed. ​“The resistance to the very idea that women have a different reality than men,just that basic fact is not palatable to so many”, she says. But Reeteka believes that understanding the root of this resistance is key to shaping the narrative of their conversations more effectively. 

Reeteka has engaged with a spectrum of responses, from genuine allies to outright dismissal. ​“The conversations need to be broad enough to capture all of this”, she says, ​“especially among those who make hiring and promotion decisions”.

For Reeteka, the work, both scientific and systemic, is ongoing. Her approach is neither confrontational nor passive, but persistent. ​“Keep talking”, she says. ​“Keep putting these issues out there”. Visibility and voice, she believes, are forms of progress in themselves. By staying in the system, questioning it, and building alternatives alongside it, Reeteka stands for a different way of thinking about resilience in research — one that is grounded in the belief that science, like the people who do it, deserves better systems to thrive.

For her, the future of Indian research must be built around flexibility, systems that recognise life transitions as normal, support diverse career pathways, and make it possible for more people to stay in science and thrive.