Muhammad Ferdyansyah Sechan
the eve of Friday, 13 October 1989
from page 139 of thesis 2024 Muhammad Ferdyansyah Sechan (pronounced sé-KHan) was born in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia, on the eve of Friday, 13 October 1989. He always spelled his nickname, Ferdy, with an “i” unHl he took a closer look at his birth cerHficate. Moving to a village called Sukabumi during his kindergarten age, he grew up surrounded by mountains, fish ponds, and rice paddies. This fostered his interests in life science and allowed him to compete in a naHonal biology compeHHon during high school. Later on, he considered enrolling in a medical school in Bandung. Yet his uncle, then a dean at a faculty in Bandung InsHtute of Technology, managed to persuade him to instead pursue a BSc in Microbiology at Bandung InsHtute of Technology, Indonesia, between 2007-2011. At the end of his BSc, he parHcipated—and becoming a finalist—in a naHonal beauty pageant. This led to his first corporate job as a scienHfic support for markeHng and regulatory affairs at Nutrifood Indonesia, Jakarta. He worked there for roughly five years (2011-2014 and 2016-2019), during which he trained himself in nutriHon science, public speaking, and criHcally parsing through scienHfic publicaHons. He wrote and published (under his department’s name) a book compiling and debunking 101 health myths prevalent in Indonesian communiHes. It was also during this Hme that he learned about studying abroad and scholarships, and he was moHvated to pursue a master degree overseas. Thankfully, he was awarded an opportunity to pursue the MSc program of Biotechnology at Wageningen University and Research, the Netherlands, between 2014-2016. The MSc program exposed him to the exciHng field of virological research. He was fascinated at how a simple biological structure such as viruses managed to hijack other, more complex, organisms, and the associaHon between viruses and diseases reawakened his past desire to pursue a (bio)medical educaHon. A book by David Quammen Htled Spillover that he read during his internship at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, made him aware of zoonoHc jumps of animal viruses into humans and how such events might result in deadly diseases. With that in mind, he applied to HONOURs, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie AcHons InnovaHve Training Network (MSCA-ITN), as the ESR 6. His PhD research, under the supervision of Dr. Lia van der Hoek at the Amsterdam University Medical Center, LocaHon AMC, was focused on rapid idenHficaHon and culturing of previously-uncharacterized respiratory viruses and, later on, sero-epidemiology of endemic human coronaviruses. During his PhD, he gained an interest in data science and scienHfic communicaHon, and he is currently looking for a career that allowed him to become a scienHfic communicator, preferably communicaHng his own works.
