AMITA SEHGAL
Professor of Neuroscience,
Perelman School of Medicine,
University of Pennsylvania
Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator JEFF FUSCO PHOTOGRAPHYIn January 1983, 22-year-old Amita Sehgal arrived in New York City from India to visit her oldest sister, who was due to have a baby. Sehgal had just been rejected from the molecular biology PhD programs at Rockefeller University and Columbia University. “I felt that I had no prospects,” says the University of Pennsylvania professor of neuroscience. She had heard about a Cornell University in NYC, so she and her other sister walked the streets of Manhattan asking its whereabouts. “Someone told us Cornell was hundreds of miles away in Ithaca, and that I must have been asking about the medical school. I had no idea, but I said ‘Yes’ and was directed to the Upper East Side.” Sehgal walked into the medical school, inquired about their PhD program, and was told that the application deadline for the program was that very day. “I sat in the office and filled out the application, wrote my essay, and handed it in!” she says. A few months later, Sehgal was admitted into the genetics program.
Sehgal’s parents had also joined the visit and were returning to India in July, shortly before she started the PhD program. “It was fortuitous the way things worked out. My parents were comfortable leaving me in New York because my oldest sister was living there.” One month later, however, her sister and family moved to Florida, and Sehgal was alone, living in Cornell housing. “The first six months were really, really rough,” she says. Cornell had dissolved the genetics program to which Sehgal had been admitted and offered her tuition support with no stipend—and that only for the first semester. “My parents and sister were in no position to help me financially,” she says. Sehgal found a professor at the adjacent Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer ...
