María Teresa Dova describes how an early career move to CERN as the first Latin American scientist to join Europe’s organisation for nuclear research ultimately benefited both her but also the researchers she now works with back home in Argentina. The move to Geneva, Switzerland, where CERN is based, required Dova to pivot from condensed matter physics, the subject of her PhD at the University of La Plata, Argentina, which she gained in 1988.  But any misgivings about the move to Europe and switching to a new field were quickly banished by her excitement at working on the L3 Large ..read more

A 2021 report by the UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean revealed that only 18% of public universities in the region had female rectors.  Vanessa Gottifredi, a biologist and president of Argentina’s Leloir Institute Foundation, a research institute based in Buenos Aires, says this paucity of visible role models for female scientists in the region means that damaging stereotypes are perpetuated. A female, she says, will not be judged harshly for staying at home to handle a family emergency, but will be for being pushy at work, unlike mal ..read more

Fernanda Staniscuaski earned her PhD aged 27. Five years later she had a child. But in common with many scientist mothers, Staniscuaski, a biologist at Brazil’s Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, saw funding and other career opportunities diminish as she combined motherhood with her professional life. “Of course I did not have as much time as I was used to have. And everything impacted my productivity,” she tells Julie Gould. The Brazilian biologist founded the Parent in Science advocacy movement after talking with other scientist parents. In the fourth episode of this six-part podcast ..read more

Paleontologists Ana Valenzuela-Toro and Mariana Viglino outline some of the challenges shared by researchers across Latin America. These include funding, language barriers, journal publication fees and conference travel costs. But the two women then list some of the extra burdens faced by female researchers who live and work there, many of which will resonate with female colleagues based elsewhere.  “When you are in a room sharing a scientific idea or project, nobody listens to you. Then another person, usually a male researcher, says what you said,” says Valenzuela-Toro, who is bas ..read more

In 2013 physicist Carolina Brito co-launched Meninas na Ciência (Girls in Science), a program based at Brazil’s Federal University of Rio Grande de Sul. The program exposes girls to university life, including lab visits and meetings with female academics. “There are several girls who have never met someone who has been to university,” says Brita. “It’s beyond a gender problem.” Jessica Germann was one of them. The 19-year-old is about to start an undergraduate physics degree. She tells Julie Gould how writing a school essay about particle physics and a fascination for YouTube science videos ..read more

Laure Sione’s postdoctoral research at Imperial College London addresses the sixth of the 17 United Nations SDGs, but, she argues, sanitation also plays a huge role in gender equality (SDG 5) and good health and well being (SDG 3) targets. Sione’s PhD research focused on water management challenges in Kathmandu, but she now focuses on Sub-Saharan Africa and the problems caused by open defecation and excrement-filled pit latrines that are sited too close to the water table, risking contamination. A third option is toilets layered with Tiger Worms. A key advantage is that these take longer to ..read more

In 2016 the University of Melbourne, Australia, asked for female-only applicants when it advertised three vacancies in its School of Mathematics and Statistics. It repeated the exercise in 2018 and 2019 to fill similar vacancies in physics, chemistry, and engineering and information technology. Elaine Wong and Georgina Such tell the How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals podcast why certain schools wanted only female candidates to apply, and how staff and students reacted to the policy. They also explain what it achieved in terms of addressing the under-representation of female faculty in ..read more

A drive to reduce suicide mortality rates is a key indicator of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Psychiatrist Shekhar Saxena, who led the World Health Organization’s mental health and substance abuse program after working in clinical practice for more than two decades, says that although progress is being made, a worryingly high number of young people are choosing to end their lives. “They have to struggle through the school education, competitive examinations, then they have to struggle for a job,” says Saxena, who now teaches at Harvard Chan School of Public Health, in ..read more

As a nutrition and planetary health researcher, Christopher Golden takes a keen interest in the second of 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and its aim to end hunger. But Golden’s research also focuses on “hidden hunger,” a term he uses to describe the impact of dietary deficiencies in micronutrients such as iron, zinc, fatty acids, and vitamins A and B12. Hidden hunger, he argues in the second episode of the How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals podcast series, could be better addressed if more people adopted a diet that includes more ‘blue’ or aquatic foods. These includ ..read more

Poverty is about more than just meeting basic material needs, says Catherine Thomas. Its corrosive effects are also social and psychological, causing people to feel marginalized and helpless. Thomas’s research into anti-poverty programs has focused on the effects of one aimed at women in the West African country of Niger, which aims to support subsistence farmers whose livelihoods are impacted by climate change. One branch of the program involved providing an unconditional $300 cash transfer alongside business and life skills training. Thomas, who is based at the Unversity of Michigan in Ann ..read more