Lab Scientists Under the Microscope: Meet Snehal Parikh

Move over real-time PCR machines. Make way mass spectrometers. Take a step back DNA sequencers.

In celebration of Public Health Laboratory Appreciation Month, we’re continuing our popular “Lab Scientists Under the Microscope” series and spotlighting the real heroes of laboratory science—the dedicated professionals who make public health laboratories hum.

Every day, these scientists work with dangerous substances and high-consequence pathogens. They connect the dots that link cases and identify outbreaks, keeping us safer from foodborne illnesses, infectious diseases and more. They work weekends, holidays and after hours to prepare samples and run programs so the rest of us can get our test results in a timely fashion. And they do it all with increasingly limited resources and funding.

Each week of Public Health Laboratory Appreciation Month, we’ll highlight one of these unsung powerhouses and give you a glimpse into their lives inside the lab. Read on to meet the scientists!

Snehal Parikh, Program Manager, Public Health Laboratory, DC Department of Forensic Sciences

What got you interested in laboratory science? Was it a teacher? A book? Your own health experience?

My family deserves a lot of the credit. Science, health, education and public service were always part of the environment I grew up in. My parents’ work spanned health care and public health. One of my maternal grandparents was a pharmacist, and one of my paternal grandparents was a chemist. More importantly, my family encouraged curiosity, service and a responsibility to help others from a very young age.

That interest became real for me while I was a student at the Academy for Allied Health Sciences in New Jersey. I was accepted to the Liberty Science Center’s Partners in Science program and given the opportunity to conduct environmental health research at Rutgers' Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute (EOHSI), conducting air-monitoring assays and examining oxidative potential and associated health effects. I later worked at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey on research involving tobacco cessation and at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School on research involving fructose metabolism.

What ultimately kept me interested was realizing that generating the result was only part of the story. I became equally fascinated by what that result can tell us about people and communities and how we can use it to improve public health outcomes. This question helped shape my academic interests and still drives much of what I do daily.

If you weren't a lab scientist, what would you be?

Probably a physician or a musician.

I spent nearly a decade in EMS and technical rescue work, so the idea of being able to serve those who need it the most has always appealed to me. There is something uniquely meaningful about that kind of direct, one-on-one patient care.

Music is the other answer because it has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I’ve played tabla since I was very young and have been fortunate to perform in some memorable settings, including a White House Diwali celebration.

Science appeals to the part of me that wants to understand how things work to improve population health, while music taps into a different kind of creativity and connection. I’d have been happy finding a life in either.

What's one piece of lab equipment you think is highly underrated? What do you love about it?

I’d nominate the autosampler. The mass spectrometer understandably gets most of the attention, but the autosampler is one of those pieces of instrumentation that quietly makes a high-throughput analytical workflow possible.

Reproducible injections, controlled sequences, consistent timing and the ability to move large batches of specimens and control samples through a validated method all matter when you’re trying to produce surveillance data at scale. You need dependable results over and over again before you can start recognizing meaningful patterns.

And I tend to appreciate the parts of a system that don’t necessarily get top billing but make everything else possible. The autosampler is a pretty good example of that.

What's your favorite pathogen/substance to work on—and why?

Two that I find particularly interesting are xylazine and tianeptine. Not because there's anything good about finding them, of course, but because they highlight the kind of blind spots public health laboratory surveillance can help uncover. Both substances illustrate a challenge laboratories know well: What you find is partly determined by what you are actually looking for. Emerging substances don’t always show up neatly in routine testing, traditional surveillance systems can lag behind real-world changes, and an important signal can remain largely invisible until laboratories expand their analytical scope or apply more targeted surveillance.

What I find most rewarding is working with an interdisciplinary team of laboratorians, epidemiologists, clinicians, toxicologists, outreach partners and other public health professionals to interpret those signals and determine what they mean for the population. Turning a blind spot into information people can act on—and potentially using that information to reduce risk or save a life—is incredibly meaningful.

The theme for this year's Public Health Laboratory Appreciation Month is legends. What scientist, whether real-life or fictional, famous or not, do you consider a legend? Why?

I'd choose Dr. Tina Fan, who was one of my earliest research mentors.

I first worked with Dr. Fan at Rutgers' EOHSI at the ripe age of 15 while I was still a student at the Academy for Allied Health Sciences. She let me participate in real environmental health research when I was still figuring out what a career in science or public health could even look like.

What makes that especially meaningful now is the full-circle nature of it. Dr. Fan has continued advancing biomonitoring, exposure science and public health in New Jersey, while my own career eventually brought me into laboratory-based surveillance in Washington, DC.

There's something pretty special about looking back and realizing that someone who helped open the door to this field for you so early is still helping move the field forward years later. To me, that's a legend.