Meet a Scientist: Dr Lahiru Gangoda

Our fourth ‘Meet a Scientist’ article introduces Dr Lahiru Gangoda. Lahiru is a senior postdoc who has been relaying with Team WEHI since 2019. She is working mostly on skin cancer and her message to you is – “Wear your sunscreen!”.

Lahiru also has a passion for science communications, and is responsible for some of the fun experiments you have seen (and will see) on this blog. Here, she talks about what makes science exciting, and what made her decide to go into medical research in the first place.

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What’s your job title and what does that mean?

I’m a Postdoctoral Researcher, which means I went to university and did an undergraduate degree, and then I did a four-year postgraduate degree, specializing in cancer research. And after that what you get into is called a postdoc.

And what are you working on?

In the human body, which is made out of cells, the regulation of cell death – the balance between the survival of cells and the death of cells – is important, and if the relative balance is tipped, it can lead to diseases. For example, too few cells dying can lead to cancer. I’m trying to understand what regulates this cell death in cancer, and what are the proteins responsible for regulating cell death here.

What made you want to get into medical research?

When I was small, my brother was diagnosed with a genetic disorder, called thalassaemia, and my childhood was associated with frequent hospital visits for his treatments. As a child, my brother had to sleep with an infusion pump injecting iron-chelator overnight. Then, when he was twenty, the medication he required became available as a tablet. This made a huge difference in his life. So I saw how a disease such as this can affect a person’s life, and also how medical researchers can help that person, by developing new drugs or medical equipment, and understanding those diseases. That’s what got me interested, I think.

And I’ve had a lot of relatives and friends who were affected by cancer and that was one of the reasons I was curious to know what was going on, because it’s very, very common now.

What’s the most exciting thing about your job?

Every day is different! You don’t know what to expect, like sometimes you do experiments you go in thinking ‘this will happen’, but completely the opposite results come instead! It’s very exciting when that happens.

One of the children who wrote to us asked why scientists are all so clever? So… why are you so clever, Lahiru?

I think it’s not just cleverness, it’s years and years of training as well. It’s like anything you do, any trade you do, you need practice to be good at it, so I think science is the same. If you have an interest towards it and a natural curiosity, it helps.

Why are you doing the Relay for the Cancer Council?

To increase awareness for cancer research, because while a lot of research is from public or government funding, more and more researchers rely on philanthropic funding, which is dependent on the generosity of the public. So we need to make them aware of the importance of the research we do. And we want to help out ourselves!

Want to support Lahiru in the Relay for Life? You can donate to her fundraising page here!