Doesn't that just roll off the tongue? I think it sounds better in Spanish: Feliz día del investigador científico, but it's still quite a mouthful.
El día del investigador científico is one of those days like, say, International Firefighter's Day (May 4th, the more you know), that you probably only know about if you're part of or close to that community. On top of that, this one is particular to Argentina, and not international at all! It commemorates the birthday of Dr. Bernardo Houssay, the first Argentine to win a Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology (for his research on diabetes). The street I now live and work on also happens to be named for him!
Having settled into life in Argentina (after recovering from a post-traveling cold, and then a nasty case of traveler's tummy), I finally feel like I have the bandwidth to sit down and write a bit.
I didn't get the chance before leaving to finish a post reflecting on everything that has happened during the last 2.5 years of my PhD, so instead of doing that, I'm going to focus on why I'm in Argentina, and what the next 8 months are going to look like.
In April of last year (2023), I learned that my application for a Fulbright Study/Research Grant had been successful. Fulbright is a program sponsored by the US State Department, originally created by a US Senator named (you guessed it) J. William Fulbright. The Fulbright program has many different components, including a program for professionals further along in their careers (called the Fulbright Scholar Program), but the part I fall under is call the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. You don't actually have to be a student to apply - you have to be done with your undergrad, and, I believe, not have too many years of work experience. Under this umbrella, we can further divide things into two parts: English Teaching Assistants (ETAs) and Study/Research Grants.
(I promise I'll stop with the technicalities soon)
The program is usually jointly funded in some way by the host country, and Fulbright has programs in over 160 countries. Because of this, the number of the different type of grants varies widely, but there is almost always more funding for ETAs than for Study/Research. ETAs get sent to schools around the host country to help teach English. Study/Research grantees have to propose a project, be it something more creative along the lines of poetry and art, or more classic scientific research.
Finally, these programs also work in reverse - folks from other countries can win Fulbrights to come to the US as Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTAs), or to do research, though my understanding is those grants tend to be only 3 months, while Study/Research grants in non-US countries are usually 9-12 months.
So, why and how did I get one of these grants?
It's been a goal of mine for a long time. I honestly can't be sure when I first heard about Fulbright - I want to say it was sometime in high school, but the only thing I can be sure of is who made it seem like a reality.
As a Stamps Scholar at LSU, there was a certain expectation that we would aspire to these types of grants and honors, and the person who often helped make that happen was Dr. Drew Lamonica Arms, the Director of Fellowship Advising at the Honors College. Dr. Arms helped me edit a variety of scholarship and fellowship applications during my undergrad, including my first (unsuccessful) Fulbright application. At some point early on in undergrad, with her encouragement and advice, Fulbright became something I felt I could realistically aim for.
The first time I applied, in 2019, I made it to the semi-finalist round. I can't say I'm sad I didn't get it then, honestly - by the time decisions were sent out in March/April of 2020...well, you know what happened. The project I submitted also wasn't something I was nearly as passionate about as the one I'm now doing.
So onto the story of my current project:
As you may know, my dissertation research focuses on beavers and their impacts on amphibian communities. As early as when I was offered the position in my PhD program, and told that would be the general subject of my research, I had the thought: "hey, there are beavers in Argentina, too!"
Beavers are not native to Argentina - they were introduced in the 1940s to foster a fur industry, allowed to expand without any checks from trapping pressure for a couple decades, and from the initial 20 individuals there are now over 400,000. I learned about this on my first trip to Argentina, in 2017, when I visited Tierra del Fuego National Park. There, I saw first hand the destruction they cause (dead, flooded forests) when not in their native environment.
I had also, in 2019, met a researcher named Dr. Alejandro Pietrek, who had done his doctoral research on the beavers in Tierra del Fuego. So when I started my PhD, I made a note in the back of my mind to reach out to him. In the meantime, I tested the waters with my advisor, and she was highly supportive of me pursuing a Fulbright, if I could come up with an appropriate project to propose.
Fast forward almost a year, and Alejandro reached out to me on Twitter, because he had noticed that I was doing work on beaver genetics. He told me there were a bunch of samples from his work that never been used, and asked if I would be interested! My immediate response was obviously enthusiastic - I had been putting off reaching out for a long time, and so having him contact me was the first piece falling into place.
Alejandro put in me contact with Dr. Sebastian Poljak, of the Centro Austral de Investigaciones Cientificas (CADIC), who now has the samples Alejandro told me about. I told him about the work I was doing with beavers in the Greater Yellowstone and threw around some ideas that I had for a comparative project and he and my advisor basically gave me free rein to develop things from there.
I submitted my second Fulbright application back in September of 2022, which seems like an absolute lifetime ago at this point, and I opened the results in April of 2023. Now, a year later, I'm finally here.
There are no amphibians here in Tierra del Fuego (an archipelago at the tip of South America) - it's too cold. So my project here focuses on the beavers themselves. Using tissue samples that were collected as part of a test eradication project, I will use landscape genetic analytical approaches to understand the relationship between beaver gene flow and landscape characteristics. Essentially, what promotes beaver movement and reproduction (which leaves a pattern of gene flow)? What impedes it? Can that information be used to inform programs to prevent the beavers from spreading even further in Argentina and Chile? And, eventually, I plan to compare my results from this non-native system to beavers in their native environment, where we might hope to promote beaver movement rather than stop it.
Fulbright provides me with the means to live in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, for the next 8 months (until the end of 2024). While here, I will primarily be doing labwork and analysis (as the samples I am using have already been collected). But, my collaborators have already invited me to tag along on some environmental DNA sampling for beaver detection and detection of other mammals - an undergraduate's thesis work. And they've suggested it might be possible to tag along on a trip to sample for marine invertebrates in the Beagle Channel (which would definitely feel like a very Darwin-esque moment). I've also started meeting other researchers and have already acquired a contact who will hopefully take me with them to do penguin work in the austral spring (October).
Down here, it's fall, and the leaves are starting to change. Hopefully when it snows we get good coverage - Luis and I are both dying to get back on our skis.
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