Research and life in Xishuangbanna

I am very happy that I got a postdoctoral research position with the CAS PIFI scholarship. In Japan, it is quite difficult for young scientists who are working on basic science to get high-paying postdoctoral position like the PIFI postdoc. Additionally, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) provides accommodation for free. Moreover, there are a lot of research funds for postdoctoral researchers and high chances to get research funding in Southwest China’s Yunnan Province. Luckily, I got two sets of research funding. Working in China with the PIFI scholarship has been a great experience for me and I highly recommend that Japanese young scientists apply for PIFI postdoctoral posts if they do not mind moving out of Japan.

The tropical canopy ecology group in Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden is a very international group. I could make many friends who came from Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, America as well as China. Professor Nakamura, PI of the group, accepted me as a postdoctoral researcher and let me do any research I wanted. Thus I could learn a lot of new things, for example, species identification, molecular experiments, and phylogenetic analysis. In addition to my own projects, I conducted a big project which is about the impact of artificial light on communities and ecosystems. I collaborated with many researchers within and outside the group and this project is still going on. It has been a really valuable experience for me to conduct a big project with international collaboration. I also had a nice educational experience here. Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden accepts intern students from Pu’er University every year and I supervised an intern student with Professor Nakamura. The graduation work of the intern student was accepted by a peer-review journal, Insect Science, and will be published soon.

It is also interesting to see the culture of the Dai people. Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden is located in the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan Province and our group employs a few Dai people as field assistants. Sometimes they invite our group members to their parties and I could try their traditional food and see their village, stilted houses, and temples. I also attended a big water festival in Jinghong, the capital of Xishuangbanna, where a lot of people were splashing water on each other. It is totally different from Japanese festivals and I found it exciting.

I am very happy to have received this PIFI scholarship. The PIFI scholarship provided me not only with a great step in my career as a young scientist but also a great opportunity to learn about the culture of Xishuangbanna. I hope that future collaborations with CAS are possible.

Takafumi Mizuno
Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden,
Chinese Academy of Sciences