Winston Wole Soboyejo

Winston Wole Soboyejo is an American materials scientist of Yoruba Nigerian parentage. Quotes I like to look at a “brain circulation” idea, as opposed to the idea of a brain drain, in that you need to have the opportunity to help people help themselves intellectually in various ways. If people stay in one place, they never get exposed to ideas beyond that region, so in that sense I believe very much in the idea of brain circulation, where you go to different places to get exposed to different ideas and you really build capacity to the very highest levels. Once you’ve done that, then the question is, where’s the opportunity space for you to really contribute and give back? For some people it means they return to work at a university in a developing country. But even then, it’s not a good idea to only just stay there, it’s good to circulate in and out of other places such as ICTP and keep getting exposed to good ideas that allow you to grow and keep exploring new frontiers. A good example of that is [ICTP Scientific Council member] Professor Francis Allotey, who has been doing this at ICTP for the past 50 years. Another potential model is like an intermediate model. Somebody like myself, who is educated outside of Africa, in some sense starts a career outside of Africa but explores ways to go back to teach and advise PhD students and perhaps spends up to four years in my case on the ground working on some specific projects. Even when that person goes away from Africa you can still continue to receive people in your lab in some way. Then there’s a third approach where you go for short visits, teach a short course, help with a specific project, help with an advisory board--you bring all of that experience you have back and you keep rotating in and out in a way that allows you to share knowledge with the next generation of people in a field. What then matters is how you circulate people, and build knowledge and human capacity and human potential, whereas often were you to insist that everyone stay in the same place, with the same knowledge and the same limitations, you don’t quite achieve the same outcome as you do with the circulation model. I think there’s some confusion in developing countries about basic vs. applied science. Many countries believe that applied science alone addresses their needs without recognizing that basic and applied science are two sides of the same coin. If you don’t have strong basic sciences you actually cannot do very unique and original applied science. If that strength is missing because you choose to focus only on applied science, the effectiveness and competitiveness of what you do on the applied science side is very limited. I think that there needs to be an environment that promotes research in both the basic and applied science arena, and you need to separate the funding for research from that for education. Many countries invest about 1% of GDP in science and technology, btu when you look at how that investment is distributed it’s .9% for education and .1% in some kind of research.