“Dear SAYAS blogger 2021, oh yes, you are among the four chosen ones! I would like to welcome you to the 2021 SAYAS blog team! Congratulations!!!” – This is one of the best emails I have received in the year 2021. Little did I know that it was the begi…

Upon completion of my Honours studies, my supervisor invited me to co-supervise to a new Honours student with him, as I had gained some level of knowledge within the project that the new student was to work on. Although this was an interesting pursuit,…

We currently live in an era of everchanging regulations and permissible daily activities due to the measures taken to curb the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier this year, I shared a vlog detailing what my typical day as a PhD student looks like…

Warning: this blog post speaks about issues of mental health, depression and suicide I vividly recall the day my supervisor called me into his office and told me: your friend decided to take her life last night. It never made sense to me. I mean, she w…

Having completed high school with low marks and staying at home for 3 gap years, a lot of people ask how I eventually managed to obtain my degrees cum laude and obtain various accolades. I wish I could give a classic copy-paste solution to overcome som…

Can you recall the last time you listened to a presentation or lecture for two and a half hours, and still wished it could last longer? Honestly… I cannot either. After Albert Einstein’s two-and-a-half-hour presentation during his tour in Japan, the au…

I was on a phone call the other day and my aunt jokingly asked me the question – “why don’t you and your colleagues there in pharmacology find the cure to this COVID-19 pandemic?” Well, I giggled a little, but her question was justified to an extent. T…

One particular question I always struggle to answer is: “Keith, what are your hobbies?” This is due to the amount of time that research consumes, rendering it a challenge to have regular hobbies. Work does not simply end when I leave the university’s g…

Attendees at the 18th World Congress of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology in Kyoto, Japan. Conducting research can be one of the most laborious things for a person to do. It involves identifying gaps in the current body of knowledge and providing clues t…

When you miss a step and fall, resulting in excruciating pain in your knee… you take a painkiller. When you accidentally cut your finger while making dinner… you take a painkiller. When you have an inexplicable headache… you take a pa…