There is life after the PhD, and it is exciting!

I think it is fair to say that I've been keeping myself busy. Check how long it has been since my last post! Wow! After the last field campaign for my PhD, yes, things got intense. There was a lot of lab work in Manaus, then data analysis in Exeter and finally, writing, a lot of writing the last chapters of my PhD. My viva happened in March 2019 (a successful one by the way) and since then, I've been on the move, sampling roots here and there, meeting amazing people and finally settling down back in Manaus for a postdoc. For how long? That's another topic (:

After many twists in my plans, twists that no Mexican soap opera was prepared to, I ended up taking all my belongings and flying straight to French Guiana to spend a few months sampling roots in a super different part of the Amazon. I realised how diverse the Amazon forest is! After spending most of my career working in Central Amazon, exploring forest growing in rocks, in valleys, close to the ocean.. wow, such diversity brings a smile upon my face! Below you can find some pics of this epic adventure. Fieldwork was divided in two parts: wet season sampling in May/June and dry season in September/October. I will never forget the people I've met, the river, the laughs, the pain of digging in the dry season, the cocktails at the end of the day, the sound of the animals in the forest.. I am very grateful for the opportunity to spend some time with amazing scientists, learning and laughing a lot. I keep learning that there are many ways of doing science. Many. This is a lesson I'll take for life!

The IMBALANCE-P project was what led me to French Guiana. After spending a month in Antwerp, Belgium in 2018, working with Ivan Janssens and Erik Verbruggen, I got to know a bit of this fertilisation experiment and we shared some ideas on my results from AFEX, the fertilisation experiment we have in Manaus, where my PhD focused on. I believe that this networking among projects is so important, it's a win-win situation in terms of standardising methods, getting to know other researchers, collaborate.. I am glad to have had the opportunity to be, for some time, a bit of a bridge among projects and researchers I admire so much.

At the background, while all of this was happening, I got a postdoctoral position to be back in Manaus, Brazil, to work with my old group, the biogeochemistry family at INPA, in the AmazonFACE project. But I'll tell you more about this incredible project in a next post. First, let me savour these memories a bit more and appreciate all the current and future collaborations that this opportunity has opened in my life, in many ways.