Month: March 2025

‘Clean water shouldn’t be a luxury – it’s a fundamental right,’ says Dr Jagannath Biswakarma, Senior Research Associate in the School of Earth Sciences. For him, this mission is deeply personal, driving his research and advocacy to tackle arsenic contamination, with promising outcomes already emerging.

My research at the University focuses on understanding the complex molecular-scale processes that occur in soils and waters – especially where they interact. These processes directly impact water quality and treatment. With Associate Professor James Byrne and our team here, I’ve been working on a project that explores arsenic contamination in groundwater and how arsenic behaves under different environmental conditions.  

Areas in South East Asia – particularly northeastern India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Vietnam – are highly prone to geogenic arsenic contamination. Arsenic is deceptive: it doesn’t give any colour or taste to the water, so if you extract water from the ground and it’s clean, clear and tasteless, it’s not necessarily safe to drink. We recently discovered that the highly toxic, dominant form of arsenic in groundwater can be converted into a less mobile, less toxic form. 

Puzzle pieces on the career path 

I grew up in Assam, a region rich in biodiversity and natural resources but burdened by arsenic contamination in groundwater. Looking back, it feels like every piece of the puzzle has had a purpose in shaping me. When I was 15, I wrote an essay on environment and water pollution for my school magazine. It felt like a small act, but it gave me a sense of purpose. I had initially planned to become an aeronautical engineer and was even accepted into a program. But my grandmother gently encouraged me to reconsider. Around the same time, my mathematics teacher introduced me to biotechnology, and I found myself drawn to the environmental applications of science. I went on to study industrial biotechnology in Chennai.  

My studies took me to Japan for an internship with the Hiyoshi Corporation, where I focused on soil and water quality analysis. After returning to India, I joined the Defence Research Laboratory, investigating medicinal plant extracts as sustainable alternatives to chemical fertilizers to mitigate fungal infections in agriculture. Following graduation, I went back to Hiyoshi and helped to build a start-up in Chennai dedicated to environmental monitoring. 

After that, I spent nearly a decade in Switzerland, pursuing my postgraduate to postdoctoral studies at Eawag and in ETH Zurich, where I deepened my knowledge of geochemistry, water sustainability, and environmental regulation – and crucially, I also acquired the language of diplomacy. This skill has proven essential in transforming scientific findings into actionable policies. From there, I arrived in Bristol in 2022 at the School of Earth Sciences, which opened the door to new research and innovative approaches to addressing the arsenic problem. 

The Ronaldo of arsenic 

Research can be humbling: one day, I feel brilliant for designing an experiment, and the next, I’m rethinking everything because it didn’t work. But those challenges make the breakthroughs even more meaningful. Science isn’t interested in pleasing our egos! But it’s great at making us approach a problem in innovative ways. My friends fondly call me the ‘Ronaldo of arsenic research’ because I’m always chasing goals to mitigate this invisible crisis. And it’s true – I’m driven. 

This February, I was back in Assam to collect more groundwater samples to gain better understanding of the factors that affect the mobility and toxicity of arsenic in the region. In one village, I watched a family drawing crystal-clear water from a well that I knew was laced with arsenic, which strengthened my resolve to alert the community, as we always do in these cases. Many of these sources are also used for irrigating crops like rice, which can absorb arsenic from the water. The contamination enters the food chain, compounding the risk. But scientific research alone is not enough! 

The science diplomat 

Arsenic of any type or concentration is toxic: chronic exposure causes illnesses such as skin lesions and cancers. To solve the whole problem, we need decentralized treatment plants with a thorough protocol, skilled human resources, policymakers, nongovernmental organizations, and behavioral change experts. In short, solving the arsenic problem isn’t just about chemistry – it’s about people and policies. So, government interventions are crucial. 

In India, the Ministry of Water Resources runs the Jal Jeevan Mission, a national water distribution agency that aims to provide adequate water for everyone – but proper quality control hasn’t been a priority. To convince the government to change that, we the scientists also need to be diplomats and use appropriate language. At Eawag, I learned valuable lessons in translating research into policy from my PhD advisor, Professor Janet Hering, who was a director of one of the world-leading water research institutes in Switzerland (again, those puzzle pieces have fallen into place!).   

These conversations are now happening: in February, I was invited to an investment and infrastructure summit in Assam- Advantage Assam 2.0, inaugurated by the Prime Minister. This provided an excellent platform to share my research insights and advocate for safer water practices. Although our work is rooted in Assam, the insights we gain here at Bristol directly inform global efforts to protect communities facing similar arsenic challenges elsewhere. 

It’s a daunting challenge, but I’m committed to making a difference in these vulnerable communities — the communities I come from. Because, wherever you live, clean water shouldn’t be a luxury – it’s a fundamental right. 

 

Some of our tissues and organs can be pretty handy at repairing themselves – except when they’re not, for various reasons. That’s where regenerative medicine comes in. Dr Helen Weavers, Associate Professor in Cell and Developmental Biology in the School of Biochemistry, takes us into the world of tissue resilience and describes the pleasure of witnessing the wonders of natural tissue repair first-hand. 

In regenerative medicine, we explore ways to either repair or replace damaged organs or tissues in the body, whether that’s because of injury, disease or age. Some tissues in our bodies – the liver, gut and skin, for example – can naturally regenerate themselves very well, and often do so as a matter of course (although this self-repair ability declines as we get older). What can we learn from these organs, and can we extend it to other places in the body? 

The concept has been around for a while, but the technology has accelerated in the last few years, thanks to new techniques that enable us to do things like growing human tissue or an organ in the lab. This, together with our growing biological knowledge, has made the idea of regenerative medicine much closer to becoming a reality in the clinic.  

Art + science = career  

My parents tell me that as a child I always wanted to understand how things worked. I’d take things apart to figure out how they were made, then put them back together again. But I probably liked art more than science to begin with. In fact, to be a good scientist, I think you need to be quite creative and come up with new ideas and approaches. So it makes sense that I’m doing what I’m doing now. 

I studied biological sciences at university, but I didn’t really know I wanted to do research until I had a short summer project in one of the labs when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge. I loved developing my own ideas and designing experiments to test them. My supervisor for that project, Professor Helen Skaer, was inspirational – a really successful female group leader who also had a very active family and social life. I stayed on in her lab for a PhD, after which I came to Bristol. 

Getting the group together

Sometimes things align in delightfully unexpected ways. I’d worked on kidney biology during my PhD, then at Bristol I switched to something completely different – skin wound repair and inflammation. When I was thinking about what I wanted to focus on in my own research lab, I started exploring where else these important pathways for skin repair might be useful or important for. I hadn’t thought about the kidney for quite a few years, but after generating some intriguing data, it suddenly struck me that these two processes – how a kidney works and how skin heals itself – might actually have lots of similarities. Kidneys are constantly under stress and employ similar ‘resilience’ pathways to stay healthy. So I started my lab on that basis, and it’s what we work on now. 

The lab is in constant flux but currently has eight members. Having a whole team of people, all interested in the same fundamental biology and helping to develop the projects with their own unique ideas, makes the whole experience really exciting. Many of the PhD students and some postdocs that I supervise, work jointly with other labs and group leaders in the Faculty, which offers great opportunities to collaborate with other groups; and the students and postdocs get to experience how other groups approach research.  

Science, life and the future

I’d always read that embryos and young children heal very quickly, often without scarring, and that we lose some of that ability as we get older. But I’d had no personal experience of it – until recently, with my baby. They’ve got surprisingly sharp nails, and they often scratch themselves accidentally, and it’s amazing to see a bad-looking cut one day and think: ‘Oh my goodness, how have they done that to themselves?’ – then to find the next day that their skin is perfect again. I think it’s really cool that all these things I talk about in lectures or read about in textbooks I can now actually see for myself. 

With modern medicine enabling people to live longer, the field of healthy ageing is growing massively. There’s a big drive to make those later years healthier, for example by improving older people’s kidney, brain, or heart function. So we want to understand why a kidney works well, and then why it doesn’t work so well when you get older or have a particular disease. And then we want to use that basic science insight to come up with therapies that might, for example, prevent a kidney in an older person from losing its function as much as before. 

I’m on maternity leave at the moment, and I love spending time with my baby son, but I haven’t stopped thinking about science. I really like my keep-in-touch days when I come into the department to catch up with my lab and discuss their research. The fact that I still want to talk about the science, even during maternity leave, has made me realise this is the right career for me. 

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You can read more details of Dr Weavers’ research at tissueresilience.com, and in a news article about her Women in Cell Biology Early Career Medal 2025.

 

To mark International Women’s Day, Ololade Adesanya, a member of the University’s Board of Trustees and Chair of the Board’s Audit and Risk Committee, shares her reflections about her mentors, turning points, and what needs to be done to create a truly diverse and equitable environment for women in business.