The professor at the Faculty of Food Engineering at Unicamp, Miriam Dupas Hubinger, was considered, for the second consecutive year, one of the most influential scientists in the world. The classification was published in the list Highly Cited Researchers, from the British consulting company Clarivate Analytics, whose study is based on the number of citations to researchers' works. In total, Brazil appears with 15 names in the publication.
“This is the second year that I have been on the list and it is recognition for my dedication to research and student training. It’s important as a scientist, I never imagined being there”, says Miriam, for whom the public university, especially Unicamp, plays a central role in her life. “I went to public school since I was little and if I hadn't gone to a public university I probably wouldn't have been able to graduate,” she says.
Miriam has been a professor at Unicamp since the 1980s and says that her work began to be more cited when she began to dedicate herself to a research front that takes into account the degradation suffered by food during processing, in order to avoid them. Her most cited article refers to a work published in 2008, in which she, together with researcher Catherine Brabet and then student Renata Tonon, who is also on the list and is now a researcher at Embrapa, they studied how to process açaí into powder.
“At the time, we studied the process, how it affected the quality of the product, how this product was preserved or behaved during storage. It is a process that had not yet been applied to açaí and we tried to preserve the original characteristics of the food”, he explains.
Research on edible films and coatings and the encapsulation of linseed oil preserving omegas 3 and 6 are also widely referenced. Currently, Miriam's main area of work is in microencapsulation processes related to structured lipids.
Path of challenges and recognition
Of the 15 Brazilian scientists listed by Clarivate, only four are women, a fact that reminds Miriam of the barriers imposed on researchers in their professional lives. “In fact, it is more difficult, there is motherhood, there is the machismo of academia”, analyzes the professor, who says she has suffered some injustices throughout her career, such as being denied a level promotion by a scholarship development body, even though they have studies with greater international impact than male candidates.
“They thought the boy’s production was better than mine. I argued with the numbers and they reassessed, but if I had stayed quiet, probably nothing would have happened”, she emphasizes, who sees many improvements in issues of gender discrimination compared to the time when she began her academic career at Unicamp. During her graduation, which began in 1975, for example, around 80% of her class was male. “Today we have many female students, they position themselves well in the market, but when a pregnancy appears, for example, I don’t really know how this market reacts.”
The main challenges currently for teachers are no longer related to the fact of being a woman, balancing workdays, but rather to the issue of funding for science and education. “Today what we have is the challenge of funds. There is a series of attacks that are leaving everyone pessimistic and discouraged. It’s a shame the aggression we are suffering.” Positioning herself whenever possible, therefore, is seen as essential for the teacher who, in addition to being recognized on the Clarivate Analytics list, has already received awards such as the Samuel Benchimol Award for the development of the Amazon in 2008 and 2009, Mercosul Food Science and Technology Award in 2009, Zeferino Vaz Academic Recognition Award from Unicamp in 2014 and INOVA Inventors Award 2017
Brazilians at Highly Cited Researchers
Check out the Brazilian researchers listed on the list:
- Miriam Dupas Hubinger (Unicamp)
- Andre Russowsky Brunoni, Houtan Noushmehr, Paulo Eduardo Artaxo Netto, Carlos Augusto Monteiro and Renata Bertazzi Levy, from the University of São Paulo (USP)
- Adriano Gomes Cruz (Federal Institute of Rio de Janeiro — IFRJ)
- Alvaro Avezum (Dante Pazzanese Institute of Cardiology)
- Cesar G. Victora (Federal University of Pelotas)
- Flavio Kapczinski (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul)
- José A. Marengo (National Institute for Space Research — Inpe)
- Mauro Galetti (Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho — Unesp)
- Roldan Muradian (Fluminense Federal University — UFF)
- Henriette de Azeredo and Renata Valeriano Tonon (Brazilian Agricultural Research Company — Embrapa)
