Six languages,
no borders

My name is Nathan Marko Markarian. I am Armenian and Canadian, raised in Montréal between Western Armenian, French and English, and I have never found the borders between them especially convincing. You learn early that the same idea lands differently in each language you carry it in, and that translating it carefully is most of the job.

Science was the first discipline I committed to. An Honours Biochemistry degree at McGill turned into a research internship in Dr. Silvia Vidal's laboratory, which turned into an MSc in Human Genetics spent largely in a BSL-3 containment facility, asking how SARS-CoV-2 evolves inside hosts whose immune systems cannot clear it. In parallel I worked with Dr. Levon Abrahamyan at the Université de Montréal's Faculté de médecine vétérinaire on viruses almost nobody writes about — Aleutian mink disease virus, Sosuga virus, the tick-borne Yezo virus.

Pharmacy came next, and it is the discipline where the translation actually matters. A mechanism is interesting; a patient understanding their clozapine schedule is useful. I am now in the Pharm.D. programme at the Université de Montréal, working through the Montréal health network — psychiatric care at the Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal, long-term care, community pharmacy, retail.

Then there is the mate. In 2025 I founded Materos Unidos after a first trip to Argentina turned an unfamiliar, bitter drink into a daily habit. Mate is a social object as much as a beverage: one gourd, one straw, passed around a circle until it is finished. Coming from a culture that does much the same thing with coffee and a long table, I recognised it immediately.

Outside all of that I train, I take photographs, and I write. I am NASM-certified as a personal trainer, I have a few hundred photographs on Unsplash, and I have kept a blog since 2020 in whichever language the thought arrived in.