We had left Brazil 10 years earlier

so that I could spend the last year

of my Ph.D. program in France.

Meanwhile, my wife started a Ph.D.

in the United Kingdom. We main-

tained a long-distance relationship

for the first few years. But by the

time our daughter was born, we’d

settled down in the same location;

I had a research assistant position

and my wife had a postdoc.

I was in an amazing scientific

environment, working next to Nobel

laureates. But I had been away

from my extended family and my

culture for too long. I missed acai,

acarajé, pão de queijo, samba, bossa

nova, capoeira, Brazilian jujitsu, and

sunny skies. I worried that I might

never return to Brazil.

My wife missed our homeland

as well. As a mathematician, it was

also easier for her to imagine doing

her work in Brazil; unlike me, she didn’t need fancy lab

equipment and expensive reagents. So with a newborn baby

at home, we started to ask ourselves whether a move was

in order.

Several events over the next few months nudged us fur-

ther in the same direction. We heard that new professor

positions had opened up at a university in our hometown,

in departments that matched both of our research pro-

grams. Then, a few weeks later, I received a call in the

wee hours of the morning from my brother, who told me

that our father had passed away. The great happiness I

had felt about my daughter’s birth suddenly gave way to

a deep sadness. I felt that I was losing precious time with

my loved ones.

After that, we had no doubt it was the right time to re-

turn to Brazil. We applied for the professorships and both

received offers. It felt like our personal and professional

lives were falling into place.

It wasn’t easy getting started with

my research in Brazil, however. I

didn’t receive any startup funding

for my lab, so I couldn’t recruit grad

students or hire postdocs. I was

able to perform a few experiments

myself thanks to reagents I had

brought with me from my lab in the

United Kingdom, as well as equip-

ment I shared with other profes-

sors. Eventually, I secured Brazilian

funding, which allowed me to form

a team of bright undergraduate and

graduate students and buy reagents

and lab equipment on my own.

Nine years later, I still haven’t

been able to perform the kind of ex-

periments that U.K. funding would

have allowed. And the antiscience

views of the current Brazilian gov-

ernment have added to my worries

about my squeezed budget.

But looking back, I’m happy that

my wife and I put our personal well-being first and made

the decision to move back to our home country. We’ve been

able to have big meals with our extended family on week-

ends. We had a second child, and our kids are growing up

close to their cousins who are around the same age. And I

was able to resume Brazilian jujitsu training, which I hadn’t

been able to do during my years abroad.

We are living the lives we wanted to live—working on

rewarding research while staying true to what we feel is

best for ourselves and for our family. Any scientist from a

developing country who is considering a move home has

to weigh the pros and cons, and the situation will be dif-

ferent for everyone. But for us, returning home was worth

the costs. j

Guilherme Santos is an associate professor at the University

of Brasília. Do you have an interesting career story to share?

Send it to [email protected].

“I had been away from

my extended family and my

culture for too long.”

No place like home

O

ur lives changed tracks the day our daughter was born. My wife and I felt settled in the United

Kingdom—we’d even bought a house 6 months earlier—but the arrival of our daughter forced

a moment of reflection. We wondered whether we should move back to our native Brazil. I

remember looking down at our newborn baby and thinking about how different her life would

be there. In our native country, we’d be closer to our family and culture. But in the United

Kingdom, I had the funding and lab resources I needed for my costly and highly specialized

research program. Would such a move sink my career?

By Guilherme Santos

ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT NEUBECKER

1150 5 JUNE 2020 • VOL 368 ISSUE 6495 sciencemag.org SCIENCE

WORKING LIFE

Published by AAAS