Pradeep Kumar Sacitharan “grew up the hard way”. He arrived in England with his parents in 1991 from Sri Lanka as a war refugee and grew up in the Chalk Hill Council Estate in Brent.

He says it sounds “crazy” but when he came to this country, he didn’t know what a career was, or what university was. His parents didn’t have an academic background and his lack of understanding of the opportunities he could chase meant he “got with the wrong crowd and didn’t do very well at school”.

Finishing with one GCSE at 16, he went on to work various retail and hospitality roles but didn’t gain much satisfaction from the jobs. “The only thing I had going for me was weight-lifting, I loved the gym”, says Sacitharan.

At 21 he approached the University of Westminster where a foundation course in biology was offered. From not knowing what university was as a teenager, he graduated with a first-class degree and went on to do his master’s at Imperial College London.

Going from strength to strength, the determined late-comer to academics was granted a scholarship to study his PhD at Oxford where he focussed on lab research on arthritis, the gut and immunology.

With “sheer determination” and confidence in his abilities, he thrived. This self-assurance led him to apply for the renowned Fulbright scholarship at Harvard University.

At age 29, he returned from the US, but he found finding a job a challenging task. “No one wanted to give me a job, so I wrote to my old fellowships and managed to go and train in universities in France and Israel. I trained with some very good people and then decided to take a gamble and went straight to China”, says Sacitharan.

After completing a PhD, it usually takes a graduate eight to ten years to gain a lab position but the risks he took meant he was working in his own lab after two and a half. Unfortunately, his time in China was cut short due to the Covid-19 pandemic so he returned to the UK where he worked as a vice president of a biotech company.

Not having any desire to press the brakes, Sacitharan said: “I asked myself what I could do to fulfil my obligation as a relative and also help people understand science more, so I decided to write a book.”

Sacitharan’s book ’99 Trillion Helpers To Improve Your Gut Health’ was published in January this year and it focuses on gut health and nutrition - topics he knows are important yet particularly misunderstood or unprioritized in communities such as Brent where he grew up.

“For me, it’s important to tell my story to get people thinking about the possibility of opportunity. It doesn’t matter where you are or how intelligent you are, you have to know how the system works and that’s something you don’t usually get exposed to if you’re from a background like mine.”

You can find Sacitharan’s book on Amazon here.