Hej everyone this is Tulio. A few weeks ago, I talked little bit about me and my work during the KBC Days conference this year. Now, I would like to share more about the challenges and the value of international experience for young researchers. Also, why I decided moving abroad from a different country to be an ‘Excellence by Choice’ postdoctoral fellow here at Umeå University.
Me, third from the left, in the panel arranged by Umeå Postdoc Society in a sessio at the KBC Days conference 5-6 November 2024.
The first challenge to move abroad as a Brazilian is the language. In Brazil we speak Portuguese, and although we have English classes in school, we do not speak English like here in Sweden. People in Brazil have other problems and learning other languages is a not priority for most of them, unfortunately. I learned English by myself during my master and PhD studies, but it was not easy, and my supervisors helped me a lot correcting my thesis and my research papers.
Moving abroad to do a post doc was always in my mind. My supervisors constantly highlighted to me the importance of international experience to be competitive in science, especially for a Brazilian researcher like me. Both of my supervisors got their PhDs in Japan, so international experience was something I needed to have. Also, the idea of living in a different country was thrilled in myself.
After my PhD, I got a job in a biotechnology company as a researcher in molecular and cellular biology in São Paulo. Nevertheless, at the same time, I was looking for postdoc positions, but not any position. I wanted to be back to fish research, to work with salmons and trouts once again. I used Atlantic salmon and rainbow trout as research models during my master and PhD studies and they are the best fish to work with. I have great passion about the fish farming, fish reproduction, and immunology.
Fish research is my passion.
By the end of 2023, after several unsuccessful attempts for postdoc positions in different countries, I saw this ‘Excellence by Choice’ postdoc position here at Umeå University to work with this fungi-like disease in salmonid fish called saprolegniasis. This disease affects all freshwater fishes and I saw it a lot infecting the salmon eggs from my experiments in Brazil. Honestly, I am not a microbiologist, and I had to study about the saprolegnia. I wondered for a moment, “this might be the opportunity I am looking for. I can challenge myself to learn something new and moving abroad to new horizons”. I did not waste more time and applied for the position.
The ‘EC’ selection took a few weeks, I was a little anxious about the results, but hopeful. The day I received the acceptance email from Umeå University was one of the best days of my life. After a few months, here I am in Umeå working with saprolegnia in professor Costantin Urban’s lab. It was an upside-down moment that happen once in a lifetime and changed my life forever.
So, this is my advice to all of you… Be brave and challenge yourself, and you can reach places that you never imagined before.
