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Imran Babar
As a child, Imran Babar saw science unfolding every day on his family's Minnesota farm as he grew vegetables and raised sheep. When he wasn't working on the farm, he fashioned spare machine parts into toys. In school, that penchant for hands-on tinkering led Babar into the biology labs, where he found his calling.
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Imran Babar
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut
Research Field: Developmental Biology
Photo: Amenah Babar
A high-resolution photograph is available on request.
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"The more I learned, the more I wanted to know," says Babar, 23, the son of a Pakistani father and a Native American mother. As an undergraduate at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, he found himself especially fascinated by basic cell and molecular biology. A devout Christian, Babar also led a nondenominational Bible study group and played in a campus “praise band.”
During his junior year, Babar won a spot in HHMI's Exceptional Research Opportunities Program (EXROP), which offers summer research experiences for disadvantaged and minority undergraduates in the labs of HHMI investigators or HHMI professors. He spent his EXROP summer doing research in the lab of HHMI investigator Tyler Jacks, a geneticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who studies cancer development.
Babar worked on a project to unravel the role of stem cells in tumor formation. He helped isolate a cell type found in the lung tissue of mice that may be an adult lung stem cell. The research has been accepted for publication in the journal Cell.
“I learned so much through EXROP — how to approach scientific questions, organize projects, collaborate, and more,” says Babar. Perhaps most important, he learned to feel more self-confident. “One of the greatest lessons was that I can be successful in science even in the highest-caliber settings,” Babar remarks. Indeed, Jacks notes that Babar is comfortable not only at the lab bench, but also before a crowd, explaining his experiments and results in formal presentations.
It's a skill that will serve him well this fall, as he enters Ph.D. studies in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale University. Babar says he chose the program for its 30 faculty members' broad range of research. He also likes the environment at Yale. “The people are friendly and personable, intense and excited,” he says. “I can see myself fitting right in.”
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