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The arrival of the experiment in February marked a career milestone for Vincent, 39: he was his first principal assignment as principal investigator thanks to a grant from the Government of Costa Rica, after years of working as a collaborator with other scientists, from the United States. “It’s really cool when it comes to an intellectual son,” he says. And he is pleased that his assignment is part of a network of similar studies in Ecuador and Colombia. “It’s Creole science,” boasts, a proud term for assignments led through Scientists in Latin America.
Costa Rica’s famous biodiversity has made it a selection destination for cash biologists around the world, but despite its relatively small population of just five million, the country has also controlled it to nurture its clinical ability in recent decades. Basically in the capital of San José and trained in Europe, it is one of a developing number of Costa Rican scientists who have returned home to publicize their careers, this is a trend that the government has fostered, in component through preparation for the university. it is put with PhD-level academics, adding promised work before being sent to higher education.
The result, Vincent says, is a new generation of more skilled and more ambitious Costa Rican scientists, especially in its tropical biology box. They are no longer happy to play a supporting role for guest scholars. “Many other people are hungry for competitive studies internationally,” Vincent says.
Progression has one drawback, however: Vincent and other Costa Rican biologists have been controlled to make a career at home, the country has difficulty soaking up all the researchers it produces. “There is no position at Costa Rican universities for the number of scientists who are returning,” says plant environmentalist Oscar Rocha, a Costa Rican who works at Kent State University in Ohio. “Many well-trained scientists now paint for cash stations or systems that exercise undergraduate students,” he says, rather than directing projects.
Certainly, scholars in many countries face a shortage of instructor jobs, but this is a particularly painful paradox given the wealth of herbs that attracts scientists from Costa Rica. “Many of us have been driven [to excel] in a smart way,” says Insect Environmentalist Fernando Soley Guardia, who earned a PhD in Australia and recently teaches courses at UCR and the Tropical Studies Organization (OTS), a non-profit study and training organization founded in the United States and Costa Rica (see table below “Today , many of us need to be back here, to study the spaces in which we have learned from the environment. But there’s not enough room. “
Although definitive statistics are available, observers say it is transparent that the developing group of PhD students in Costa Rica. Now, 80% have this degree and a doctorate, it is mandatory for new hires.
Rocha, who is 62 years old, has undergone this transformation firsthand, while pursuing a master’s degree at UCR in the 1980s, serving as director at La Selva, a study station about 80 kilometers north of San José that passes through the OTS. exposure to invited scientists encouraged Rocha to move abroad; he received his doctorate from Pennsylvania State University in the United States in 1990, then returned to Costa Rica and then became president of the UCR School of Biology.
In this work, Rocha encouraged efforts to send Costa Rican fellows to doctoral programs, to avoid “insanguinity,” he says, and then lure them back. His branch strengthened the analytical skills school academics needed to qualify for foreign programs. college has worked to position them with colleagues in the United States and Europe, and has helped academics offslly download investments from foreign sources. Under a formula called reserve square, Costa Rican universities also directly funded higher education for some academics if they agreed to return to reserved university work. “The ball started rolling,” Rocha says.
Many biologists who have emerged from these efforts have gone beyond taxonomy and descriptive science that has long been a culture in Costa Rica. Vincent, for example, is conducting broader hypothetical studies as the first ecologist of UCR ecosystems, running to reveal how physical processes such as geochemical cycles shape organisms and ecosystems. “A long time ago, we felt like we were more of a passionate technician,” says forest ecologist Roberto Cordero of the National University of Costa Rica, who at 58 is part of Rocha’s generation. we ask for more and provide more information. “
The 42-year-old microbial ecologist Adrion Pinto is part of this new generation. Earlier this year, he stopped at his lab on the UCR campus in San Jose, searching glass boxes that house leaf-cutting ants he uses to teach schoolchildren. the occupied ants had fragments of leaves, others had a brown fungal structure. Graduate studies of Pinto at the University of Wisconsin (UW) in Madison have shown how bacteria in ant fungal gardens fix nitrogen or air in a biologically usable form; The paintings were published in Science in 2009 and then returned to Costa Rica, where he had a to-do at UCR due to the reservation system.
Pinto changed his role in these bacteria as nitrogen catchers to extract them for useful chemicals. “The basic studies here are very difficult to fund,” he says. He and two co-studies now lead a team of 22 people dedicated, in large part, to polling Costa Rica’s insect ecosystems in search of compounds that may be useful in medicine. (Biologists have discovered a promising antibiotic called selvamycin on a leaf-cutting ant lawn in La Selva. )”It’s a great country for microbial ecology,” Pinto says.
Pinto is a rarity in Costa Rica: he is also a lead co-researcher with a grant from the US National Institutes of Health. But it’s not the first time With researchers from the University of Washington. Su laboratory examines bacteria to determine their antimicrobial activity and then sends promising clues to the University of Washington for studies with beloved animals. “Created a style for success” in Costa Rica, says University of Washington evolutionary biologist Cameron Currie.
Other returning biologists have focused on the conservation of Costa Rica’s vulnerable species. Gilbert Alvarado, 37, a wildlife pathologist who studies endangered tropical frogs, earned his doctorate in Brazil. Today at UCR, Alvarado has helped rediscover several populations and an entire species of frogs in Costa Rica that would have been wiped out in the 1980s and 1990s through a fungus called hydrodium, which killed amphibians around the world. He and his American collaborators recently used specimens from Costa Rican museums to show that chitridium was provided in the country’s frogs. a century ago, suggesting that it is slowly spreading or has evolved to more lethal. Now, in the lab, it breeds chitridium-resistant frogs that will be released to shore up vulnerable populations.
UCR evolutionary biologist Beatriz Willink, 32, returned to Costa Rica two years ago after a PhD. Sweden, is conducting a more basic investigation. She studied why girls evolved safe colors to draw pairs. He returned home not only because Costa Rica’s ecology is full of “questions”, but also because he feels an ethical and legal responsibility to teach here, drawn through “the concept that other people from all walks of life in this small Latin American country can have this publicly funded education. . »
Although Vincent, Pinto, Alvarado and Willink have secured positions that lead them to ownership, many other Costa Rican researchers are suffering to find acceptable jobs. “I know other people who are incredibly qualified and have published a lot of smart articles that are just queuing,” says Willink.
One obstacle, according to several scientists, is Costa Rica’s reserve system. Their intention, attracting and retaining skill through offering PhD fellows with a task, once made sense, they say (only Vincent did not accomplish his homework that way). , with an abundance of trained researchers around the world willing to compete for university tasks, the reserve is a little “outdated,” says evolutionary biologist Marcelo Araya-Salas, a doctor who does not work in books and is looking for a task in Costa Rica.
To stay active while they wait for a task to open, some medical scientists paint for conservation organizations or, in some cases, part-time research. For example, Jimena Samper-Villareal tests and paints on the ecology and recovery of seagrasses. at the UCR Center for Marine Sciences in a scientific position that sits between a quarter and three-quarters of the year. He returned in 2016 after his PhD to Australia, so his two young ones can be close to their families. But there are “very limited opportunities in Costa Rica,” Samper-Villareal says, and he’s “trying to keep my publications in place” while waiting for an opening.
Some researchers have chosen to wait for the completion of postdoctoral scholarships abroad, while others have joined the clinical diaspora in Costa Rica, occupying professorships in the United States or elsewhere in the quest to return, Rocha notes.
It is not known whether the labour crisis will ease in the future. Lack of investment has reduced the number of Costa Ricans receiving scholarships for doctoral studies; at UCR, they went from nearly 50 a year in 2016 to just 22 last year, which can reduce the job festival. But the same shortage of investments can limit home jobs. The country now spends about 0. 4% of its gross domestic product on science, less than in past years when its economy was stronger.
Another thing is a university pension formula that turns out to discourage older teachers from retiring and creating new vacancies, says geneticist Gabriel Macaya, former ucR rector. One solution would be for universities to set aside more budget to hire scientists altogether. time put not headlines, says Macaya.
Some of the experienced scientists who have mentored this new generation are dismayed. “It’s troubling to see other intelligent young people with an intelligent education who don’t use their talents,” says William Eberhard, a prominent American evolutionary biologist who joined UCR in 1979 and retired. about five years ago. ” And it’s especially frustrating when you’ve put time and effort into helping them get where they are. “
Among Eberhard’s undergraduate academics, Soley Guardia, who then studied how killer insects use clever methods to catch weeding spiders for their PhD in Australia. Soley Guardia now wants to do comparative studies with the Costa Rican species of those competitive predators, but it hasn’t. However, he discovered a permanent post. He says his double brother Mariano, a biogeographer, is in the same situation.
Soley Guardia speaks wistfully of eminent scientists, some from Costa Rica outdoors, who influenced him: “It’s great to have this exhibition,” he said. Now we’re a little autonomous in the right direction. We’re offering our own ideas. “
But he fears that he may not be able to meet them if he remains in his local country. “The bad thing”, he says, “is that we aspire to do science at the point of evolved countries without having the money to pay. ” for it. “
With the emergence of a new generation of tropical biologists in Costa Rica, an establishment that has driven many of its careers through a difficult time. The Tropical Studies Organization (OTS), a 57-year-old non-profit organization that manages educational activities systems and cash stations in Costa Rica, began this year to emerge from a monetary jam to deal with disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
American scientists attracted to Costa Rica for their vast biological diversity founded OTS in 1963, supported through a consortium of six U. S. universities and the University of Costa Rica (UCR). His 8-week fundamental course on tropical biology, designed in component through the prominent American environmentalist Daniel Janzen is mythical: many American and Latin American tropical biologists have followed him. The OTS has “played an incredible role in tropical biology,” says Rakan Zahawi of the University of Hawaii, Manoa, former director of the OTS station.
The OTS flagship site in La Selva in northern Costa Rica, which includes 1,600 hectares of lowland rainforest, is one of the most productive tropical box resorts in the world. Studies there have produced 6,000 or more articles on topics ranging from forest dynamics to insect plants. Although some Costa Rican scientists have noticed that La Selva and the other two OET stations as “gringos enclaves,” as the 2002 tale says, they are now mounting places for biologists in the Americas. “We love OTS and La Selva,” says UCR microbial environmentalist Adrion Pinto. “It’s a treasure for us. “
But the OTS’s still precarious finances, largely covered through contributions from its approximately 50 member institutions, as well as gifts, scholarships, student and visitor tuition, have plummeted over the past decade. undergraduate courses presented in Costa Rica through U. S. universities. A imaginable decline in students’ interest in long trips and a breakup with Duke University, the OTS headquarters in the US, is a imaginable decline in interest. Deficits reached $1. 6 million in the past four years, from annual expenses of up to $8 million. Its $16 million endowment decreased to $1. 7 million.
In 2017, a new manager, Sandy Andelman, cut to save $300,000 in wages, lowering worker morale. Last year, the OTS suspended its undergraduate program in Costa Rica, only a South African program on savannah ecology continued.
These measures helped get OTS out of its hole. Now, “we’re doing well,” says Beth Braker, president and CEO of OTS, of licensing Occidental College. This year, the OTS will have its first balanced budget in four years, said OTS President George Middendorf. is about to launch a fundraising crusade and is making plans for new graduate courses.
But COVID-19 poses a new threat. Just as leaders were about to rebuild and rent key positions, COVID-19 excluded visiting scientists and forced course cancellations. Although Costa Rica has recently opened its borders to some visitors, the ECA’s revenue from station fees and face-to-face courses is likely to continue. general grades until at least June 2021.
When the ETI comes out of its crisis, a new agreement with UCR assistance will make it sustainable, according to the leaders of the OTS and UCR. It will “reaffirm . . . a dating of mutual trust,” says Pinto, acting vice president of UCR. The maintenance of the OET is vital for Costa Rica, says Gabriel Macaya, board member of the OTS and former president of UCR: “This has been a very vital bridge for studies in other ways.
He was supported through the International Center for Journalists in Washington, D. C.
Jocelyn is editor of the journal Science.