Title: Developing closer social, cultural and scientific ties between institutions

PIFI Fellow: Prof. Raphael Didham, CSIRO and the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Western Australia

Host Institution: Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Many scientific collaborations develop only via meetings at international scientific conferences, or via emails, but it is rare to be able to develop a rich and productive scientific collaboration across countries without being able to spend a long enough period in the same place, with high-quality interactions. I feel very fortunate to have been awarded the PIFI fellowship to provide an intensive amount of time for collaboration with Professor Zhu and his group at the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing. 

What I have learned from the PIFI opportunity is that the rich social and cultural dimension to interacting together face-to-face over a long time period is just as important as the scientific collaboration on data analysis and writing manuscripts. The PIFI fellowship has given me a new appreciation for the ways in which to develop collaborative networks across institutions, by learning from the way Professor Zhu has developed close ties between institutions across China, and brings together research consortia for targeted workshops and symposia (such as his pollinator initiative). I learned a great deal from this about social and cultural networking, using media such as WeChat collaborator groups, and ResearchGate projects, with very broad participation both nationally and internationally. I intend to use these same practices in the future to develop further research collaborations of my own, and strengthen the ties between CAS, UWA and CSIRO. 

I also learned about the much greater challenges faced by early career researchers in China, compared with Australia, working in a very competitive environment with a large population and limited opportunities for positions as scientists. I was very impressed with the incredibly strong work-ethic of research students and postdoctoral researchers, particularly at CAS, and the innovative approaches to their science. Prof Zhu and I discussed extensively the similarities and differences in the research environments for early career researchers in China versus Australia, and we were fortunate to be able to write about our findings more broadly in a letter to the Editor of Nature, in which we made a series of recommendations that we feel would help early career researchers in China be as competitive as possible on the world stage. We feel that some of these ideas could be widely useful not only throughout China, but also in many other regions of the world as well. 

The key advantage we had in developing these ideas was that both of us had spent a good length of time on scientific and cultural exchange in each other’s countries, and in my case this has been entirely facilitated by the PIFI award.

Correspondence | Published: 03 August 2016

China: Change tack to boost basic research

• Raphael K. Didham & Chao-Dong Zhu

Nature volume536, page30 (04 August 2016) | Download Citation