On being a scientist in one's home country

(Second of three parts)

(Delivered during the second Convention of Future Scientists last Feb. 27 at De La Salle University Manila)

A great institution of higher learning is characterized by the excellence of its graduate programs. It is the quality of the Ph.D. degree program, not B.S. nor M.S., that sets the reputation of a science or engineering department. This is because a Ph.D. degree is a research degree that is awarded to a graduate student after he has contributed something new to the body of scientific knowledge. The said requirement is consistent with the goal of science, which is to improve the accuracy of our understanding of how Nature works. 

According to the highly respected university ranking system that was developed by Shanghai Jiao Tung University, the strength of a university is measured by the number of Nobel prize and Fields medal winners among its alumni and in its faculty and staff, the number of highly cited researchers and the publications produced by its staff in the high-impact journals Science and Nature and other peer-reviewed journals that are abstracted in the Science Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index. 

It is evident that publication in a peer-reviewed journal is the single most important measure of scientific productivity — the fundamental building block of one’s scientific career. No one has ever been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, Chemistry or Medicine without publishing at least one original scientific paper. Not even the quintessential scientist Albert Einstein who received the Prize in 1921 for his work on the photoelectric effect and quantum theory.

I expect faculty members to supervise Ph.D. students. Hence, faculty members who teach in graduate programs must have the desired Ph.D. degrees. Many Philippine universities have difficulty offering competitive graduate programs in the sciences and engineering due to the lack of qualified Ph.D. degree holders in their faculty roster — not more than 10 percent of faculty members in our higher education system today are Ph.D. degree holders.

Moreover, only a small fraction of Ph.D. faculty members in leading Philippine universities, including the University of the Philippines, have successfully mentored Ph.D. students. The lack of competent Ph.D. supervisors continues to be the most glaring weakness of our higher education system today. 

Great mentors are the most effective recruiters of young scientific talents. They play a key role in containing the diaspora of young Filipino scientific talents to the G-7 countries. The brain drain is not caused by lack of patriotism but by the narrowness of the spectrum of viable graduate programs that are available locally.

That our best B.S. graduates continue to prefer studying abroad and that they could easily find assistantship positions or scholarships in US, European or Japanese universities is a cause of concern. It means that their science or engineering departments have failed to convince them to pursue graduate studies locally and help build a scientific tradition in the home country.

I expect every scientist to understand that no area in science and technology is more important than others. In the same token, no scientific discipline is more difficult than others. A scientist should not blame his field for his poor research performance. Doing so is like a ship captain complaining about the sea.

The skill and confidence of a Ph.D. student are acquired through long hours of experimentation and analysis, and regular interactions with his supervisor and fellow students in research meetings and seminars. His training is a shared experience that is enriching to both his supervisor and fellow graduate students. The life of a scientist, no matter how accomplished he might be, is always marked by daily attempts to understand Nature more clearly and accurately. 

It has been eight years and seven days since I wrote my Dadufalza lecture. In that span of time, I authored or co-authored more than 50 papers in SCI-indexed journals in the US and Europe and successfully graduated 12 Ph.D. students at the National Institute of Physics. I also received two international awards, the Galileo Galilei Award from the International Commission for Optics in 2004 and the triennial ASEAN Outstanding Scientist and Technologist Award from the ASEAN Committee on Science and Technology in 2008. I am particularly pleased with these awards since they were won based on scientific accomplishments that were achieved with colleagues and students at the National Institute of Physics. In our own little way, we have shown that Filipinos could perform good science in their own country.

(To be concluded)

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Caesar Saloma has a Ph.D. in Physics, and is a professor at the National Institute of Physics, College of Science, University of the Philippines Diliman. He is presently the Dean of the College of Science and is a member of the National Academy of Science and Technology. He is the recipient of the 2004 Galileo Galilei Award of the International Commission for Optics and the 2008 ASEAN Outstanding Scientist and Technologist Award. He also received the Metrobank Foundation Outstanding Teacher Award (Higher Education category) in 2007. E-mail him at [email protected].