Boyan Tsankov

What is your name?

Boyan Tsankov

What is your role in the department?

I am a final year PhD candidate in the Department of Immunology, in my sixth year, and I study the role of T cells and inflammatory bowel disease. I am currently in the Philpott lab and hoping to transition into a career in academia after this and seeing where life takes me after my defense (Boyan has now successfully defended his thesis, go Doctor!)

How has your lived experience shaped your career in the scientific field?

I was born in Bulgaria in 1997, six or seven years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, which means that the country, despite being typically considered a Western country, was relatively poor at the time, and still is to some extent. Growing up, you would see as many stray dogs in the streets as you would people.

I asked one time when I was on a walk with my dad, why do these stray dogs have a patch on their ear? He explained that they are being vaccinated against a very deadly disease, which we now understand to be rabies. That got me interested in how vaccines work and how we can use them to provide community protection, for humans and for animals.

That was coupled with other experiences. My mom is a psychiatrist, so a lot of the conversations in my home revolved around science. My dad is an artist, but he could still understand those conversations. Both sides of the family taught me to think about the world in both a creative and a scientific way, which is fundamentally what doing a PhD is all about. You have the creative aspect, the artistic one, and you also have the scientific one, which is data driven and analytical.

Fast forward to 2005 when we moved to Canada, my older sister taught me how to focus at a very early age. After school she would tell me to do math drills and to learn my multiplication tables. If I got one wrong, she made me repeat solving the problem 10 times until I got it correct. That really taught me how to be rigorous in everything that I do. You need to have a solid foundation before you start solving complex problems, whether that be in science, in life, or anywhere else.

Does your scientific background impact your life outside of work? And how?

Yes, I would say it does. I think as scientists, we are trained to be data first. The PhD process really teaches you how to analyze data critically and to think about numerous assumptions behind the makings of that data, and the numerous interpretations of that data.

That applies to me, perhaps to a fault, in living my life, because you start to see every single interaction, whether with other people or when you get a certain type of feedback, even outside of science, as data. You interpret that data in a way that you take it and use it to influence your life, like in an experiment.

In terms of getting feedback from other people about things that are unrelated to science, you take it, you synthesize it, and then that informs subsequent actions.

What’s one lesson you’ve learned that you’d share with aspiring scientists?

I would say there are two lessons. The first lesson that I would share is that aspiring scientists should be reading broadly. There is a temptation, depending on the lab environment that you are in, to focus in on your field of study, and I think that is actually counterproductive. I have found that my biggest breakthroughs throughout my PhD had been when I have been listening to seminars by other professors in a totally unrelated field or reading papers out of pure interest that are not in my direct field.

You start to have a broader understanding of how biology works, because fundamentally, we are not immunologists, we are scientists. I do not think we should narrow ourselves down to one niche field, and when you read broadly, you have these bigger ideas that you can implement into your own work. I think that is where amazing discoveries happen.

I would say the second lesson would be to really focus on developing your fundamental understanding. I think there is something to be said about reading old literature from the 70s and 80s so you can understand where your field came from. It is also important to be able to perform fundamental techniques correctly such as proper pipetting, aseptic cell culture, and running qPCRs and flow cytometry.

I feel like now there is an emphasis on starting off with doing these crazy omic techniques. So, when you are in your first year, you have barely done proper cell culture, barely done some proper fundamental experiments, and you lack that context to really be able to appreciate the power of those omics techniques.

If you could have dinner with anyone, who would it be?

I really love reading classic literature and am a particular fan of Kurt Vonnegut, so I would probably have dinner with him. He is a classic American author writing about really dark concepts – for example loneliness and death - in a very humorous way.

It sounds kind of odd when I am saying it, but the overarching theme of his work is that we are all individuals intimately connected by our shared humanity. There is good and bad in every one of us, and we all experience sadness, loneliness, and grief. I think it is important, especially in this day and age, to be accepting and loving of your fellow man and to realize that life is hard for everybody.  It’s also equally important I think to be kind to ourselves and try to find light and humor (however difficult it may be) when things aren’t going our way.

He just seemed like a very wonderful and gentle human being that had love for everybody. I would like to emulate that a little bit in my life.