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Focus On Europe:
"I have this kind of patriotic thinking that if we won't come Research by the
back and if we won't make a change, then who will?" -- Numbers?
11 July 2008
Agnieszka Dobrzyn
Industrial Postdocs: The
Road Less Traveled
After Success Abroad, a Polish 13 June 2008
Scientist Returns Home Packaging Yourself for
Chelsea Wald Product Companies
Poland 23 May 2008
29 August 2008
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Beaming proudly, biochemist Agnieszka Dobrzyn (pictured
left) shows off her newly renovated lab, including her latest
expensive toy, a gas chromatograph. She has reason to be proud, and not just of her lab. CAREER TOOLS AND
Hired as a lab director in 2006 at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology in Warsaw, RESOURCES
Dobrzyn has won several prestigious grants in the past year, and her five-person lab is
publishing their research on obesity-related diabetes regularly. "I really believe that I will be Current Employers
able to do something" to contribute to the field, she says, her smile wide and self-assured.
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Dobrzyn, 35, was not as confident two-and-a-half years ago, when she took a gamble that positions on our site.
could have scuttled her career. After a successful postdoc at the University of Wisconsin (UW),
Madison, she ignored several job opportunities in the United States to return to Poland, a
Science Careers Forum
country with significantly less funding and fewer top research positions. She wanted to be part
of the changes she was seeing--or at least hoped she was seeing--in the Polish scientific Post a question, get an
community, even if it meant taking on some career-related risk. answer on our online
community
"The quality of science in Poland has suffered from two main, mutually related problems:
catastrophical level of funding over the last few decades and brain drain of young, talented Graduate Programs
scientists seeking careers in North America and Western Europe," says Adam Szewczyk, the
Nencki Institute's acting director. As in many other post-Communist countries, Poland's strong Browse our database of
economy and ongoing political reforms are reversing those trends, creating the potential for a program profiles
world-class science infrastructure. One of the keys to realizing this potential is attracting and
supporting pioneers like Dobrzyn, promising researchers who are willing to demonstrate that a How-To Guides
career in Poland can be as rewarding as one abroad. "I have this kind of patriotic thinking that
if we won't come back and if we won't make a change, then who will?" Dobrzyn says. Writing a resume/CV

Beating the interview
TAKING RISKS Getting funding

Dobrzyn grew up in Bialystok, a city in the east of Poland. When she was a child, her father, a Managing a lab and staff
chemist, worked as a food-safety tester for the government, and she learned to love science by
Building your network

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visiting his lab. Later, she attended Warsaw University's Bialystok campus and then earned her
Ph.D. in 2001 at the Medical University of Bialystok, studying the effect of exercise on muscle Salary Tools
metabolism. She met her husband, Pawel Dobrzyn, also a biologist, while in graduate school.
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James Ntambi says he "tried hard to persuade [Dobrzyn] to come and work in my lab as a calculator
postdoc" at UW Madison. Dobrzyn knew she wanted to work for Ntambi when she saw him
give a conference presentation on his work in diabetes, which is as major a public health
problem in Poland as it is in the rest of the world. Ntambi also made an offer to Dobrzyn's To Advertise Find Products
husband, Pawel, persuading him to switch from his focus on environmental biology. They
accepted.

Ntambi's group was working on answering a burning question: Why does obesity lead to
diabetes and other diseases? In particular, they wanted to know which molecules play critical
roles. Dobrzyn was "thoughtful and thorough" in her experiments, Ntambi says--and they soon
hit on something that was potentially groundbreaking. She and her colleagues found that the
enzyme stearoyl-CoA desaturase (SCD) causes fat buildup in muscle, liver, and other tissues
that don't usually have much fat. Mice without this enzyme build up less of that fat and are
more sensitive to insulin--that is, less likely to be diabetic.

This single enzyme, they realized, could be a target for new treatments for diabetes and other
diseases of obesity. "It was at that time a huge discovery," Dobrzyn says. The American Heart
Association (AHA) agreed: They gave Dobrzyn a 2-year grant to study the effect of the enzyme
on heart disease. It was an auspicious start to her career.

When her postdoc and the AHA grant ended in 2005, Dobrzyn faced a big decision: Should
she follow promising prospects in the United States or return home to Poland? "It was pretty
tempting to stay," she says--indeed, some Polish colleagues didn't understand why she would
give up opportunities in the United States. But together, she and her husband decided to go
back. Partly, they wanted to raise children in their home country, but they also wanted to
participate in the changes that were taking place at home: Poland was becoming more
integrated into the European Union, meaning more funding and more opportunities to interact
with international colleagues. The Dobrzyns also heard rumors that young, successful
scientists might soon be offered their own labs and larger grants.

REAPING REWARDS

The two biologists returned to Poland, moving back to Bialystok, Dobrzyn's childhood home.
Dobrzyn returned to her alma mater, the Medical University of Bialystok, to complete her
habilitation, which is required for most independent positions in Poland. She quickly learned
that the rumored reforms were still just rumors there; because of long-standing hierarchies, a
young scientist would never be allowed to head her own laboratory. "In Poland, change goes
pretty slow, I was disappointed to learn," she says. "A few months after I came back, I was
really not sure it was a good decision in terms of my career. And I was kind of thinking about
[going] back" to the United States.

Her worries were short-lived. In 2006, Dobrzyn learned that the Nencki Institute was running a
competition to hire Poland's best young biologists--demonstrating, Dobrzyn says, that it's "one
of the very few Polish institutes trying to change this very old-fashioned way that science is
organized." Part of the institute's strategy is to hire young scientists through international
competitions, then make them group leaders with the same independence and flexibility that
they could expect in the United States or Western Europe. Habilitation isn't required. The
institute gave Dobrzyn 100,000 in start-up funds, in addition to salaries for herself and four lab
members. "It is one of the best [packages] you can get in Poland," she says.

Almost a year and a half later, Dobrzyn's string of successes has continued. In December, she
won a prestigious Installation Grant from the European Molecular Biology Organization
(EMBO). In June, the Polish government announced a new grant for young scientists who
earned high scores in an international funding competition; Dobrzyn is one of only 10 scientists
who qualify. Dobrzyn's real excitement, though, is about what the grant symbolizes: "The
Polish government saw the need to support young scientists in Poland and finally responded to
it!!!" she writes in an e-mail.

Dobrzyn's husband is a member of her lab, her partner in research as well as in life. "I wasn't

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sure that [working together] would work for us," she says, "but once we started it was pretty
nice." Nonetheless, he hopes to finish his habilitation and get his own lab, in which he too
would work on lipogenic enzymes such as SCD, which have become a passion for them both.
Feeling secure for the first time in years, she says that children may be in the picture soon. "I
am pretty confident that I would be able to share the PI [principal investigator] duties and the
mother duties," she says.

All has not been perfect. Just after she started at the Nencki Institute, Dobrzyn was emotionally
floored by the hassles of ordering office furniture from an uncooperative provider. She saw it as
typical of the indifference that remains in many Polish bureaucracies. And although her small
group is close and colleagues have been welcoming, she still feels like a rookie and misses the
camaraderie developed in Wisconsin.

This makes her all the more grateful for the networking opportunities offered by EMBO, which
held a conference for grantees in June. "Scientists at the early stages of their careers
frequently feel isolated," says Gerlind Wallon, program manager for the EMBO program.
"Meeting others in a similar situation creates a special atmosphere of belonging and trust."

Today, Dobrzyn is certain that she made the right decision by returning to Poland. She hopes
that her success will serve not only herself but also her country--by helping to lure other
scientists back to Poland.

Chelsea Wald is a freelance science writer based in New York.

Photo (top): courtesy of Agnieszka DOI:
Dobrzyn 10.1126/science.caredit.a0800129