When you move for work it’s always kind of the same, in India as in the UK. But the country, the culture, the place, everything is different and there is always a lot to learn in the interaction with new people
“The land of coconuts”, better known as Kèrala state, is a small southwestern state of India and land of origin of Abdul Haneefa Kummali, medical physicist and traveller always in search of new professional opportunities to catch. He speaks Malayalam, a regional language and cultural identifier of Kèralan people.
There he studied physics in both his bachelor’s and master’s degree and in this last one he specialised in Radiation Physics. In his academic path he developed a deep theoretical knowledge in the fragmentation of carbon ions and in particle and ion beams both used in the treatment of cancer. In 2010 he lived in Romania for one year for job reasons and then he went back to India where he worked as a medical physicist.
Nevertheless, he wanted to strengthen his knowledge in the medical physics field and found an opportunity for a PhD in Italy that was very much aligned with his specialization. The Italian supervisor offered him an opportunity to work on the fragmentation of carbon ions used in the Hadrontherapy, a specific and still emergent cancer therapy treatment. He had all the documentation necessary for obtaining the visa, that is the university documents, a letter from his Italian supervisor and his study certificates translated in italian. He became part of a structured and collaborative project between different Italian universities and German institutions of research and worked as a PhD student from 2012 to 2014.
The Italian supervisor advised him to go living in a university residence and that choice was one of the best he made. His PhD in Turin was a great time for him, he lived with and knew many students from all around the world that he would have never met outside of the residency. In his group of friends, there were many from Iran, a girl from Bolivia, some Italians and others from many other countries. He loved the social life of the campus. He also had the chance to visit a lot of Italian towns, he went to France and Spain. Here, he went visiting his brother, also a researcher at that time.
After his PhD he decided to go back to India and dropped the field of research but had the chance to implement what he learned in Turin on the Monte Carlo studies in different projects. He worked in Mumbai as a medical physicist for three years. Mumbai is chaotic. One of the most crowded and busy cities of the world where people, sounds and traffic are unimaginable if you have not been there. Right now, he does not feel like living in that kind of crowd anymore and he would not bring his family there because of the high rates of air pollution.
“When you see Mumbai from the outside, you see it as huge, but if you start living there, you become part of that crowd and you go with it”.
Then, he moved to the UK where he has now been living for six years. Working as a medical physicist in Mumbai and in London was almost the same in terms of what he had to do daily, what changed was the way he could do it. While in the first everything was not well framed and documented, in the second everything was more systematic with specific and written procedures to follow. Moreover, once in the UK he started working in governmental institutions and his job became clinical based.
“When you move for work, it’s always kind of the same, in India as in the UK. But the country, the culture, the place, everything is different and there is always a lot to learn in the interaction with new people. It is an interesting experiment””
Both in London and in Essex, he has found a great international community. Multicultural people are not only in the society, but also in the workplace and people gather around everywhere. There are communities from the Middle East, African countries, East European States, a huge Indian community and specifically from Kèrala, his region. He firmly thinks that his sociocultural background is an added value for British society even because “England lives mostly because of foreigners”.
He is now working at the Southend University Hospital in Essex, as the “Principal Clinical scientist-leading the IT section in Radiotherapy”. Basically, he does not see oncological patients in person, but his job is part of the pre-patient QAs, quality assurances, and essential procedures to ensure that the patient receives an accurate radiation dose. His job can be divided into two tasks. The treatment planning for radiotherapy through a software that simulates the cancer of the patient, useful to understand the maximum radiation dose that affects the tumour with a minimum effect on other organs. The other one, is the quality assurance of the linear accelerators, the radiotherapy machines through pre-tests together with commissioned experiments on new machines.
For the time being, he has decided to keep on working in England even if sometimes the desire to move around and explore other countries comes to his mind. But it may be hard to renounce stability when you find it, especially when you have a daughter to take care of that takes all of your free time playing, reading books and much more.
He misses his parents, even if technology helps a lot with the distance. They sometimes visit him in England, but because of the climate, too cold compared to Kèrala’s, they cannot stay long. But, apart from that, he does not miss other cultural or social aspects because of the great Kèrala community present there and because he has travelled a lot in his life and he is not particularly bound to those aspects. He would like to come back to Italy once, he misses the Italian delicious food, much better than the English one of which he is not a fan and to which he prefers a plate of Biryani rice, a Kèralan dish that he loves.
