My name is Ilya Smolensky, I am a postdoc in translational psychiatry. I was born in St. Petersburg, Russia with perinatal ischemia and later diagnosed with cerebral palsy. My cognitive functions are unaffected, now I mostly have problems with hands - they shake and are not dexterous enough to do any precise tasks. I was always interested in nature: as a child I dreamt of being a doctor, when I was bullied as a teenager, I thought about living in the woods far from all cruel people. Then my family suggested me to become an zoologist and study wildlife. I went to the university where my interests shifted to neurobiology and my own mood struggles brought me into research of stress and depression. I found out that depression could be caused by hormonal changes and not just by psychological factors and since then psychoneuroendocrinology is my main passion. My hands were a problem to do the wet lab experiments during the university courses and I felt desperate about graduation and becoming a biologist. I overstepped my fear, tried to join the neuroendocrinology lab in Pavlov Institute of Physiology to study animal stress models and the PI took me into the lab to perform behavioral tests which was feasible to me. I made my BSc, MSc and later PhD in this lab and for my postdoc I wanted to focus more on the molecular mechanisms of depression which seemed a tricky task without performing any molecular experiments. But I joined the right team where my knowledge in molecular psychiatry are more important than ability to pipetting and cutting the brain samples. As my doctor said me once "If you are smart enough, you will be a scientist regardless of your hands. If you are not, hands will not help you".
This session was recorded at the 36th ECNP Congress in Barcelona.
