Mobility
Mobility, networking, and training are some of the keystones for MSCA fellows, and they are often not separable. The fellowship is intended to prepare us to become independent researchers, which nowadays includes, creating your own network, getting to know people and different labs, learning new methods and working like a crazy. Research beyond national borders, allows us to interact with top academics, exchange ideas, broaden our perspectives, obtain ideas outside of our core research field, and gain new skills.
As part of my research project, I collaborate with a lot of different people on different subtopics. I began my MSCA-WF in April, which basically meant, I was not in Prague at all for the first month of my fellowship. Instead, I went to Bayreuth to discuss details of the project and exchange material with Nicolai Nuerk. We are collaborating on the evolution of Hypericum, one of the few genera that are actually found in the Paramo and the Afroalpine - species numbers differ markedly between the regions though.
After just a week in Prague, I traveled to Norway. First, for a workshop in Bergen with Mike Pirie and colleagues to discuss target sequencing and methods on how to handle these large amounts of data, how to clean them and what to do next. Followed by another week in Oslo at the National History Museum to collect some more Hypericum samples.
In early June, my entire working group traveled to Montpellier to present our findings at the “Tropical Ecology 2022” conference. It was one of the best conferences I have ever attended. The sun was shining, super interesting research was presented, and everyone was totally into networking. Two years without proper exchange is a looong time…and it was nice to see all the new stuff that is currently being worked on. After all the travel restrictions, it was a lot of fun, to meet colleagues and friends again and discuss science in person and not via online tools - it still makes a difference!
Overall, in the first 8 weeks of my fellowship, I spent less than half of the time in Czechia and visited three countries. While mobility is an important part of the MSCA-WF, it always was important during my work. I started doing research at the University of Mainz in Germany, did a postdoc in the USA, and now work in Czechia. I went for field work in South Africa, Peru, Rwanda, visited workshops in Norway, Greece, Sweden and Canada, went on conferences in Germany, USA, South Africa, Switzerland and France, visited herbaria in the UK, South Africa, and USA and maintain collaborations with researchers from Spain, Norway and Germany currently. I guess that’s how the life as a scientist looks like if you do international research - often, we are trying to combine different events in the countries we are visiting and due to COVID, we learnt that some meetings can be held online. Nevertheless, it still requires a lot of travelling, and unfortunately, often by plane, without having sufficient funds to at least compensate for all the CO2 emissions.
There is almost no data about the benefits of mobility in science. According to a publication about mobility in the UK (Guthrie et al 2019), mobility differs by gender, discipline, nationality, and career stage. Barriers to mobility depend on individual circumstances (do you really want to move your whole family to another continent for a two years contract?). Our professional mobility is apparently mostly driven by professional expectations - it has been associated as already mentioned with professional development, and academic performance (the larger the group of collaborators the more scientific output).