So close, yet so far

Posted on 06 May 2016 by Jack Leeming

An infection biologist gets a home-grown reminder of the importance of her research.

Guest contributor Maiara Severo

About nine months ago, I got a text message. It was my sister, asking me if I knew anything about a disease called Zika. It made sense — I have a PhD in medical entomology. As we texted, my sister seemed alarmed. There were a few rumors that Zika was spreading into the north east of Brazil – where she and I are from and where she is still based – but no one really knew what to think or do about it. She asked me if she needed to take precautions of any kind. I told her not to worry too much, just avoid being out around dawn time, and to wear long pants, socks and perhaps a cardigan whenever possible. I couldn’t tell her to simply use repellents. She was trying to get pregnant. Continue reading →

From Scotland to Brazil: Queuing up in the urban jungle

Posted on 18 Mar 2015 by Julie Gould

Getting through the mountains of paperwork and bureaucracy when moving countries can be difficult, but don’t forget the reasons why you moved in the first place, says Gina Maffey in the third part of her adventures from Scotland to Brazil.

{credit}Image credit: Gina Maffey{/credit}

I stared blankly at the wall. The air-conditioning unit was humming away merrily, but it could offer no advice to my conundrum. The man behind the desk repeated the question, asking where I was born. The form in front of him said England, but my passport said that I was British. My mind was hurriedly trying to piece together an answer, stumbling over the unfamiliar language. How on earth do you explain the fact that the United Kingdom is comprised of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and that England is a country within that kingdom… in Portuguese.

Our first week had been punctuated with encounters such as this as my husband and I sought to get all our documents in order. Hours of waiting in queues; passing from one desk to another; seeking approval from banks; the federal police; the tax office. The path to adventure had a seemingly slow and bureaucratic beginning. Continue reading →

From Scotland to Brazil: Playing Tetris

Posted on 20 Feb 2015 by Julie Gould

How do you pack your life in one bag? Gina Maffey continues to look at the challenges and opportunities faced by an academic couple moving abroad.

Contributor Gina Maffey

Snowdrop {credit}Image credit: Gina Maffey{/credit}

I sat staring at the two cases on the floor. This was like a complicated game of Tetris. Weeks of lists had culminated in scattered piles around the cases – there was a pile of ‘definites’, a pile of ‘maybes’ and a pile of ‘just-in-cases’. I willed the strewn items to slot into place. Packing becomes more difficult when you try to put a sense of normality into your case.

Clutching a cup of tea, my gaze shifted from the chaos on the floor to a flurry of movement outside the window. A long-tailed tit family was fighting off intruders to their bird feeder, scattering seeds over the snowdrops below. The first snowdrops of the year – a promise of spring, a promise of warmer, longer days, a promise of change.

Is change necessarily a good thing though?

It was a question that had been bouncing round my head for the past few weeks. The culmination of a series of ‘what ifs’ that sat in the pit of my stomach, or woke me like an alarm call at three in the morning. At times I couldn’t tell if I was being rational or ridiculous.

It had always been this way. Right through university. That nagging voice at the back of the mind, second-guessing whether you’ve done the right thing for your career – planting a small seed of doubt that was sometimes difficult to ignore. Continue reading →

From Scotland to Brazil: Making the decision (twice)

Posted on 02 Feb 2015 by Julie Gould

This is the first of a series of posts by Gina Maffey on the challenges, opportunities and difficulties faced by an academic couple moving abroad.

Contributor Gina Maffey

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{credit}Image credit: Gina Maffey{/credit}

It had been two months since I’d finished the PhD, and the wind was coming straight off the sea up on to the dunes. My husband and I were sat huddled in the frosty dune grass watching sanderlings scoot along the shoreline below, while we listened to the curlews in the fields behind.

Aberdeenshire had become our home. We loved the landscape, the people, our work and our lifestyle. Yet, once again one of us turned to the other and asked:

“Do you think we should move?”

We’d been discussing it for years; pie in the sky dreaming of where we could go once my PhD was finished. We were at a point where moving would be relatively easy, we had no mortgage, no children and a lot of energy. But, all the while we’d been settling into a comfortable rhythm of normality.

We’d weighed it up. On the one hand we were perfectly happy where we were. We could pursue funding for projects in our area, continue to build on the research we’d started in Aberdeen and nurture the networks that were beginning to grow. Or, we could look for something completely different, geographically speaking, and indulge our pie-in-the-sky dreams. We convinced ourselves that if we didn’t act now it might not happen, and agreed that whoever found something first would take the lead.

Shortly after our discussion on the beach my husband went for coffee with a colleague, who asked:

“Would you be interested in working in Brazil?” Continue reading →

Research opportunities in São Paulo

Posted on 21 Jun 2014 by Julie Gould

Contributors: Lynn Kimlicka, Prital Patel and Saheli Sadanand

Most of us currently associate Brazil with football, the Amazon rainforest, and Carnival. Add extensive, well-funded research opportunities to the list.

Brazil has a growing economy, with the seventh largest gross domestic product (GDP) in the world. In addition, it has a growing bioenergy industry and robust agribusiness. With the resources to perform cutting-edge science, Brazil is now looking to strengthen its scientific research community.

International work experience is becoming an expected entry line on researchers’ CVs if they hope to climb the academic ladder or gain a tenured position. Multitudes of organisations now aid scientists in seizing such global opportunities. São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), Brazil’s largest publicly funded, regional grant funding institution, is one such example. Continue reading →

‘Brain circulation’ and other trends in global science

Posted on 29 Mar 2011 by Rachel Bowden

Forget ‘brain drain’ – many countries are now focusing their efforts on making the most of ‘brain circulation’, according to a new report on global science from the Royal Society, Britain’s national academy of science.

In a shift away from attempting to stem the flow of talented scientists overseas, countries such as China and India are setting aside resources to attract native scientists back home later in their careers while maintaining their links with host countries.

Many nomadic scientists who remain overseas are also keen to maintain links with their home countries but are unsure where to start, making them an “untapped resource” for international collaboration, according to the report, Knowledge, Networks and Nations: Global Scientific Collaboration in the 21st Century.

Where brain drain is still a major problem, such as in Africa, governments need to reward talented scientists and enable them to foster global networks while ensuring they also help build national research capacity.

Other highlights of the report include:

• International collaboration is growing, and has a significant effect on a research paper’s impact (see ‘Research sans frontières’ for more)

• In addition to the meteoric rise of China and, to a lesser extent, Brazil and India, other rapidly emerging scientific nations include Turkey, Iran and Tunisia

• R&D investment in developing countries is increasing: the share of foreign-owned business R&D in the developing world grew from 2% in 1996 to 18% in 2002

• Regions and cities are displacing countries as the relevant unit when discussing R&D – in the United States, the state of California accounted for more than one-fifth of national R&D spending in 2004, while Moscow accounts for 50% of Russian research articles

• Many established research centres and funders have become global brands that are no longer necessarily confined to their geographic location – the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom has a campus in China, for example, while the UK-based Wellcome Trust helps fund institutes in Asia and Africa

What’s your reaction to the report? If you’re a scientist working overseas, do you plan to return home later in your career? Are you seeing the benefits of international collaboration? Share your thoughts below.

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