This week on the Nature Careers Podcast: How to keep Ukraine’s research hopes alive
At its heart research is about the search for fundamental truths, the aspiration of putting the subjective aside to find something deeper, more universal.
In today’s episode, we’re looking at an event which has devastated the lives of scientists and ground research projects to a halt: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And some may not want to return because they ended up in better conditions than they had in Ukraine. So I think it will lead to a big brain drain. And this is a big problem for Ukrainian science.And how has the invasion affected you personally, both in your life and for your work?Oh, yeah, it was a terrible situation. I remember that first day.
And after that people with an active pro-Ukrainian position will be sent to concentration camp. So with my active position I have repeatedly posted on Facebook pro-Ukrainian posts. They also did not now, if you would get to Bukovel, because they were bombing and shooting around. It was really very, very scary. Immediately behind us when we passed the bridge across the river, that bridge was blown up. They were no way back either.
But you know, every cloud has a silver lining. The fact that two years before the war, we learned to work remotely, thanks to COVID, helped us a lot. That they continued to work. They analyze data, wrote articles, they delivered lectures to students, and even organize the Brain Awareness Week. We return to Kiev at the end of April, Then the Kiev region was liberated.
By the way, the problem was not so much in money, but in the purchase itself. Accumulators, batteries, generators, instantly ran out in Ukraine. And we bought them in Poland and in Czech Republic. So autumn and winter were very difficult for our research. Due to the lack of heat, for example, laboratory animals in our vivarium experienced cold stress. I would say no time was wasted. But the experimental work slowed down substantially.
Is there anything that you really think the international community should be aware of about research in Ukraine that isn’t really being spoken about in the time that we speak, just over a year that the war has been going on?The international community needs to know that we are ready to work here in Ukraine, and we are ready to accept their help. And we are ready to do our best to restore science and education here.
Often educational institutions they don’t have proper bomb shelters, or constant power supply, internet supply.Just on a personal level, what does it mean to you to see this scale of disruption to Ukrainian academia?I think that to absorb war, in general, in your own country, it’s hard. Even to be not sitting there but to absorb that from the news, from talking to your parents, from the distance, that’s hard in general.
One of the main goals also of the UGU is to preserve and multiply human capital of Ukraine, as it is important for the strong development of the country for the postwar recovery. So each of these students they aim to come back to Ukraine and to rebuild the country after the war.
And they could work efficiently for providing support for Ukrainian students. So that was just great.What are the prospects or potential challenges for reestablishing academic institutions in Ukraine after the conflict?It’s a hard question, a bit philosophical, maybe, One of the challenges in general to move back people that left Ukraine. One of the challenges is that these people saw different life, let’s say, a different organization in the society.
Matthew Druckenmiller is based at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder in the United States.And I’ve also in recent years, in addition to my role as a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, I’m also the director of an office called the Navigating the new Arctic community office.I wanted to speak with Matthew about how Arctic research has been impacted by this war.
But in practice, there are concerns regarding the safety of colleagues in Russia, because formal communication, even if it’s purely scientific, is putting those Russian researchers in risk. Because as I understand it, most Russian scientists have been directed to not collaborate with foreign scientists.
And as an academic, as a researcher, you base your career and your decisions about what research to pursue, largely based on the partners that you’re actively able to work with. And so understanding how that warming affects different species in terms of biodiversity and species loss, species migration, the emergence of invasive species, all those require broad sampling that in part is in Russian territory.
And one of the best examples of of this impact is on how rain on snow affects reindeer husbandry. We had a large portion of our research centered on working with scholars and reindeer herders in the in the Yamal region of Russia. And so within that project, our collaboration with Russian scholars and with communities, reindeer herds in Russia has been entirely disrupted.
And the trust in the science that is not being biased by decisions that were tied to the war is something that will also take a while to move past.That was Matthew Druckenmiller. And this has been our first episode of freedom and safety in science.
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