What an aquarium pest taught me about professional adaptability

From ScienceMag:

I stared at my home aquarium, weary and uncertain about my professional future. Some years after returning home to Ecuador to lead a research group, I was battling the challenges of doing science in a resource-limited environment. The mesmerizing coral structures offered some comfort, until something unpleasant caught my attention: a single Aiptasia, the tiny, persistent anemone that aquarists regard as a pest. No matter how often you scrape them off, they grow back stronger. Then, I smiled. These humble-looking anemones, often dismissed, stood for something deeper: regeneration, resilience, and adaptation, all themes of my own professional journey.

My first scientific love was embryonic development—itself a form of reinvention. During my undergraduate studies I encountered Gastrotheca riobambae, a frog endemic to the Ecuadorian Andes that carries its eggs in a pouch on its back. How these bunches of cells self-organize to form a complex organism was a real marvel, and I thought I would study frogs for the rest of my life.

But Ecuador had no doctoral programs. To continue my training, I needed to look abroad. I was excited to get a spot in a program in Belgium—though none of the labs offered the opportunity to continue my frog work. So, I made my first pivot and joined a zebrafish lab, studying how fish embryos develop.

It didn’t go as I hoped. Disoriented by the new culture, language, and research environment, I wrestled with whether I should try to stick it out and push through, or pivot yet again. After much reflection and several discussions with the program director, I came to understand that the lab environment simply wasn’t a good fit for me—and that changing course wasn’t failure, it was adaptability.

I still wanted to study embryonic development, but the opportunities were limited; the closest fit was in a mouse lab studying blood vessel development. I wasn’t immediately inspired by the topic. But the more I learned, the more invested I became. It was a reassuring reminder that reinvention was also evolution. For my postdoc, I took another turn and returned to studying how tissues rebuild themselves, this time in the mouse liver. The science was exciting, and I felt professionally anchored. But once again, life pulled me in another direction.

My partner and I separated, and she returned to Ecuador with our children. I followed, though leaving my thriving postdoc behind and returning to a country where high-impact research felt almost impossible seemed like walking away from the future I had worked so hard for. I spent 2 years traveling back and forth between my native country and my postdoc lab, until a university in Ecuador trusted in the potential of my work and offered me a position as a lab head, allowing me to be home full time.

I was thrilled to be able to spend more time with my children. Professionally, though, it was a tough transition. Funding was scarce, infrastructure was limited, and I had to build everything from scratch. Lacking the specialized facilities and readily available reagents I once took for granted, I had to rely on resourcefulness and improvisation. Mouse models had to be adapted from a local zoo and validated for research. Mouse food had to be prepared by hand mixing supermarket ingredients. I had to convince government authorities that the antibodies and other basic reagents I wanted to work with were not public health threats. Meanwhile, the pressure to publish kept mounting. Could I truly make a difference here?

That’s when I found myself staring at the Aiptasia—a cheap and accessible model organism that I suddenly saw as a fresh way to ask impactful questions about regeneration, resilience, and stress. That was 9 months ago. Since then, I’ve reinvented my research again, using Aiptasia to study how environmental stress and pollutants affect reef organisms.

My future is still uncertain; that’s the nature of doing science in Ecuador. I’m counting on reinvention to re-emerge in moments of need. For many of us building research careers in the Global South, it is how we survive, grow, and keep moving forward. I no longer see reinvention as a deviation from a plan. It has become the most transformative force shaping my path.

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