In a letter published in Science magazine, a group of Brazilian researchers, who work in Brazil and other countries, draws attention to the need to develop programs capable of attracting and retaining scientists trained in the last decade.
Even though the country has more than doubled the number of doctors trained in the last 20 years and climbed ten positions in the article publication ranking between 2007 and 2011, repeated budget cuts since 2015 have immensely harmed the country's science and technology system, argue the authors (Read more).
As a result, they highlight, many of the approximately 100 scientists at the beginning of their careers are unemployed or in jobs that do not require academic training as a scientist. It is a highly qualified workforce, trained with public investment, including through the Science without Borders program.
“In 2019, the unemployment rate in this group was 12 times higher than the global average”, write the researchers, who work at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), federal universities of Goiás (UFG) and Bahia (UFBA) , as well as institutions from Sweden, the United States and the United Kingdom.
“There is a lot of talk about brain drain, but a large part remains right here, in jobs that do not require the long preparation and investment of a scientific career. Of course, every profession is worthy, the point is that the country chose at one time to invest in training researchers and now it is not seeking to recover that investment. It’s like building a mansion and abandoning it”, compares Thaís Guedes, currently a researcher at Unicamp’s Institute of Biology (IB) and first author of the letter.
Guedes is supported by Fapesp in the Young Researcher modality, which seeks to encourage the creation of job opportunities for researchers with demonstrated international experience in research after completing their doctorate.
For researchers who have not yet obtained a permanent position at a research institution, Fapesp also offers Research Grants, such as the Geração Project.
In the opinion of the president of Fapesp, Marco Antonio Zago, the successive budget cuts were certainly quite harmful to the Brazilian science and technology system and, together with the lack of readjustment of the value of scholarships in the federal system, made it difficult to retain and attract young people researchers.
“However, that’s not all,” says Zago. For example, the values of FAPESP scholarships correspond to approximately twice that of scholarships from the federal system. Despite this, the demand for doctoral scholarships at the Foundation fell by around 30% in the period from 2020 to 2022 (the interview was given before the adjustment announced yesterday, 16/02, by the federal government).
He also considers that for some years there has been a global crisis in the training of qualified human resources in science, worsened by the pandemic, in part due to young people's lack of interest in a scientific career. For Zago, this factor must not only be taken into account, but also needs to inspire the creation of policies and programs to attract the best brains to Brazil.
Even with the recovery after the peak of the pandemic, the decline persisted. Some indicators show a drop of approximately 30% in requests for aid and scholarships to FAPESP, for example. The decrease was accompanied by a decrease in demand for postgraduate courses and more than 40% in undergraduate engineering courses in the private network, between 2014 and 2020 (Read more).
“In the United States, we seek to solve this problem by attracting highly qualified young researchers from different parts of the world, such as China, India and Brazil. We need to compete for the brains that will generate the innovations of the future, or we will be doomed to import technologies developed in other countries”, says the president of the Foundation.
Recently, Fapesp and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) launched a notice to hire young researchers in research projects both at universities and research institutes and in companies (Read more).
Job opportunities
Another co-author of the letter published in Science, Alexandre Antonelli, from São Paulo, scientific director of the Kew Royal Botanical Gardens, or Kew Gardens, in England, and professor at the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden, states that the Science without Borders program, which granted almost 104 thousand scholarships abroad and cost R$13 billion, it was something huge even by international standards. However, Brazil not only ended the program in 2017, but also drastically reduced investments in science since then.
“It was wonderful to see the large number of students graduating from the program. I had never seen anything like this in another country. For a new program of this type, however, a more careful selection and more stable, long-term investments would be important, in order to use resources more effectively and include those that could really make Brazil stand out on the international scientific scene. ”, believes the researcher.
Furthermore, Antonelli highlights the importance of guaranteeing new opportunities and providing attractive working conditions for the best Brazilian researchers, including those currently outside the country.
“In China, there were incentives for the return of researchers who were abroad, mainly in the United States, with attractive salaries, funds for setting up laboratories and flexibility for researchers to create their research programs. Something like this in Brazil could attract people who are in the industry or outside the country, in addition to recovering what was invested in training these scientists and sending an important signal to the population, including future students, that there is interest in investing in science and technology ”, says Antonelli.
For Márcio de Castro Silva Filho, professor at the Luiz de Queiroz School of Agriculture at the University of São Paulo (Esalq-USP) and dean of Postgraduate Studies at the university, a fundamental step in attracting young researchers is a substantial change in the Brazilian postgraduate studies.
Silva Filho leads a proposal to reformulate master's and doctorate courses in Brazil, aiming to reduce the training time for researchers and give universities greater autonomy in managing their postgraduate programs.
“Our postgraduate model dates back to 1965 and little has changed since then. Today, it takes an average of nine years for a doctor to graduate, arriving on the market at almost 40 years old. In Europe and the United States, this time is five years, with the person obtaining a doctorate degree at around 30 years of age”, he explains.
The proposal was presented to the National Education Council (CNE) of the Ministry of Education and will also be communicated to the commission that prepares the National Postgraduate Plan (PNPG) 2021-2030. Within a more comprehensive proposal, one aspect to be considered is that the master's degree would be preparation for the doctorate, lasting around one year. In other words, the time required to complete a master's and doctorate degree would be five years, unlike the current approximately nine years. However, for programs that choose to remain in the current system, there will be no problems.
Furthermore, the proposal proposes greater autonomy for universities in postgraduate studies. Today, institutions depend on approval from the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Capes) for changes such as merging programs, changing the name and areas of concentration or reallocating scholarships within the university.
Silva Filho also believes that postgraduate studies should provide new skills that can also be applied outside the academic career, such as working in companies, government entities and the third sector.
“In other countries, the absorption of doctors already occurs largely outside academia. At USP, for example, we are implementing a series of postgraduate actions to give students skills that can be used beyond research, better preparing them for a rapidly changing world”, he concludes.
The authors of the letter emphasize that attracting young researchers to Brazil is essential to fulfill commitments that have already been signed, such as the goals of the Paris climate agreement, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations (UN).
The letter Invest in early-career researchers in Brazil was signed by Thaís B. Guedes, José Alexandre F. Diniz-Filho, Luisa Maria Diele-Viegas, João Filipe R. Tonini and Alexandre Antonelli.
