Mind craft

Exactly how does the brain take shape in the embryo? Tole has won awards for her efforts to answer that question. She has now been picked to head the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO), the first person from outside Europe and North America to do so. Snehal Fernandes sits down with her to discuss absurd questions faced by women in STEM, her abiding questions about dreams, and how dance helps her think more clearly

- Snehal Fernandes

Shubha Tole's fascination with the brain began, she says, with the question of how colour makes its way into dreams. "How is the circuitry that makes us dream created inside our heads?" she wondered.

Michelangelo played a small but critical role too.

Tole was a Class 12 student at Mumbai's St Xavier's college, sitting riveted in a developmental biology class taught by the brilliant Sam Waugh, when he quoted the Renaissance sculptor's famous words: "The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work... I just have to chisel away the superfluous material."

"That's when I realised that development is essentially creating form and structure out of basic raw materials," she says. This realisation lit a fuse. Where she had intended to study medicine, Tole now decided to indulge her fascination for the brain.

She wanted to learn more about how this mushy blob of tissue- "one that ancient Egyptians considered useless and not worth preserving in their mummies," she says, laughing makes us think, understand, love, and wonder about our place in the universe. She dreamed of understanding how the brain comes to be, and therefore how our sense of self is formed.

Accordingly, after Class 12, she picked life sciences and biochemistry. She went on to earn a Master's degree and a PhD in neuroscience from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). There, she met her future husband and "24-hour friend" Sandip Trivedi, a physicist.

She continued her research into how the brain develops in the embryo, as a postdoctoral fellow at University of Chicago. After a decade in the US, aged 31, she and Trivedi returned to India.

It was 1999. Tole joined the department of biological sciences at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), and set up a first-of-its-kind laboratory for research into the developing mammalian brain.