I have been dedicated to terrestrial and extraterrestrial rocks for 40 years, first in the Soviet Union, where I was born and grew up, then in Canada in the early 1990s, and most recently at the Australian National University (ANU). Canberra is a wonderful place to live, and ANU was a great place to work, so I did not expect that I would so soon be looking for a new job. However, trouble comes when you least expect it. In October 2020, when ANU was experiencing financial difficulties due to COVID-related restrictions on student migration, the director of the school where I worked told me that the cosmochemistry and experimental petrology were being removed from the research program, and my services, together with the services of three other senior academics, were no longer required. I was 63 at that time, and felt I had enough energy to continue active research for another decade or more, so I started applying for jobs in my research area around the world. However, these applications were bringing one rejection after another. Universities wanted to hire early- to mid-career researchers who would set up new labs and then use them for their research for a few decades.

Hope came in 2021, when one of my colleagues at ANU talked to a former student who worked at the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry (GIG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and he recommended CAS’s GIG, which had state-of-the-art facilities suitable for my research, and were looking for a researcher with expertise such as mine to maximize the efficiency and fully exploit the potential of their facilities. I discussed this possibility with my other colleague and long-term collaborator, who is a professor at the University of California, Davis, and has an extensive network of research contacts in China. The next day, I received an email from Professor Xu Yigang, Director of the State Key Laboratory of Isotope Geochemistry at GIG, and after a short discussion we decided to submit applications to the PIFI program to support my work at GIG for nine months, as well as to the National Talents Program with the prospect of longer work in Guangzhou. To my joy and surprise, my PIFI fellowship application was successful! It rekindled my hope to continue my research, following my redundancy at ANU. Resulting from continuing COVID-related restrictions and the need to help my PhD students to complete their projects at ANU, Professor Xu and I opted for special provisions from CAS for fellows of the PIFI program to continue their research from their home countries throughout the pandemic.

Although I did not come to China at that time, those nine months of research supported by the PIFI program were exceptionally productive. I saw my two PhD students complete their analytical work and deliver exit presentations, participated in the initial analysis of the asteroidal rocks returned by the Hayabusa 2 space mission, and conducted the amount of my own lab work that I would usually take three years. Some of that work yielded unexpected and exciting results that seemed to overturn one of the paradigms of cosmochemistry. A manuscript based on these results is now under revision in Nature Communications. But perhaps most importantly, the PIFI fellowship broke the trend of bad luck that haunted me for a year. Although my original application to the National Talents Program was unsuccessful, we submitted a new application in 2022, and were successful. Now, there is an opportunity to spend a few years in Guangzhou working at CAS’s GIG. The PIFI fellowship happened to be the swallow that made it spring. The future looks bright again.

Source: Yuri Amelin,

Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry,

Chinese Academy of Sciences