He brings people together. She is good at recruiting other people to her vision. She has crossed boundaries between nations, scientific fields and languages. She is invaluable to the physics community.
These phrases are used to describe four of the remarkable early-and mid-career scientists profiled in our SN 10: Scientists to Watch. And the gist of those observations — that collaborating and communicating with others is essential to science — is true of all 10 of the scientists on our list. They get that science depends on more than being smart and hardworking; it also requires building connections with others, to make one’s own work possible and to amplify the work of all.
And they’re already reaching out to help the next generation of science superstars. Jacqueline Gerson, an SN 10 honoree who’s a biogeochemist at Cornell University, is working to demystify what she calls the “hidden curricula” for getting into science so that more people can find their way into the profession.
Science has long been a team sport, despite the lingering presence of the “great man” trope. Einstein was a noted collaborator and mentor, and a savvy Nobelist takes care to note the legions of grad students, postdocs, colleagues and researchers around the world who made a breakthrough possible.
In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientific collaboration rose to the next level, with tens of thousands of researchers worldwide racing to learn about the coronavirus. In one notable case from 2021, 15,025 researchers from 116 countries were named authors on a peer-reviewed academic paper from the COVIDSurg and GlobalSurg collaboratives — a feat noted by the Guinness World Records. The groups collected data from 1,667 hospitals on more than 140,000 patients globally to evaluate the benefits of vaccination for patients undergoing elective surgery. Another 2021 analysis determined that the surge in pandemic research, with 245,222 researchers publishing papers on COVID-19 in 2020 alone, far eclipsed the number of new authors for earlier epidemics including Zika, Ebola and HIV/AIDS. All told, more than 700,000 scientists had published work related to COVID-19 by 2021. Though that rush to join the cause resulted in some flawed work, the success of the mobilization is indisputable. The FDA approved the first COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use on December 11, 2020, just nine months after the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a pandemic.
And speaking of collaborators, some of them have wings. In this issue, we explore how efforts by researchers in Africa to use fruit flies as model organisms are paying off in making biological research more efficient and cost-effective. The multinational effort is not only accelerating research on the continent, but it is also connecting African scientists with the global research community and making it easier for junior scientists to do research.
I especially loved learning about Rashidatu Abdulazeez, a Nigerian researcher whose first fruit fly collaboration started with setting out a bowl of rotten fruit to lure her study subjects. She has since founded Droso4Nigeria, which brings fly-based lessons to secondary schools. Abdulazeez also uses the flies to address urgent public health issues, such as lead poisoning.