Markus Wenk, assistant professor, Depts of Biochemistry and Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore; Sonia Davila, postdoctoral fellow, Genome Institute of Singapore

Credit: R. LOON

Advancing in your scientific career is difficult enough, but securing a tenure-track position at the same time as your partner who is also a scientist is quite another. Markus Wenk and Sonia Davila took a drastic approach to solving this problem — they moved halfway around the world from the United States to Singapore this year.

In 2002, Wenk realized that he needed to establish himself as an independent researcher — impossible as a non-tenure-track researcher at Yale University. “My driver was to become independent and to steer my work on lipid function towards a ‘systems-biology’ approach,” he says (see CV).

So he looked to Asia, because he was aware that opportunities there tended to include a high-tech component — something he was interested in exploring in his research focus of membrane-lipid biology. He soon found an opportunity in Singapore, where the government has created a huge ‘Biopolis’ to house an expanded national research effort (see Nature 425, 746–747; 2003).

When Wenk received an offer from the National University of Singapore (NUS), things got complicated. First, he got a counter-offer, including tenure-track status, from Yale. Second, his partner Davila, who Wenk had met at Yale, needed to find a job as well. He turned down Yale's offer and Davila secured a position at the Genome Institute of Singapore. Both admit that their sense of adventure played a part in their decision to move.

Wenk and Davila say that they have noticed a different culture within their new research groups compared with the ones they left behind in the United States, where labs tend to be shrouded in secrecy and characterized by competition. “The lab concept here is not as closed as in the States,” says Davila.

And neither feels isolated from the West. Wenk plans to keep an adjunct appointment with Yale and is also evaluating the possibility of creating a Master's programme in tropical-disease research at the University of Basel in Switzerland, the NUS and the Novartis Institute of Tropical Diseases in Singapore.

One other thing that Wenk and Davila are happy with is Singapore's climate — especially Davila, who finds the tropical temperatures more akin to her native Spain.