Maria Jose Ruiz Lopez
BIO
Postdoctoral researcher in molecular ecology at Estación Biológica de Doñana, Spain. Mother of two.
Instagram: @mariruilo
Twitter: @mariruilo
Maria Jose Ruiz Lopez
“Being a mother changed my career completely.”
I am a mother of two. I am also a molecular ecologist and in my research, I combine information obtained in the field with the use of genetic tools to understand host-parasite interactions and estimate population genetic diversity. I obtained my PhD in Spain and moved to the USA for my postdoctoral research.
I got pregnant while was a postdoc at University of Oregon, USA. My partner andI thought it was going to be challenging because we were really far from our families and neither of us had a permanent position. What we couldn’t imagine was what was about to come. At the end of my pregnancy, I developed severe pre-eclampsia. Our daughter was stillborn at 37 weeks, and I ended up in the ICU for a week. I returned to work 7 weeks after our daughter died. I tried my best for a year, but the combination of grief and brain fog became too much and a year later when my contract was finishing I decided I needed a short break to protect my mental health. Shortly after I had stopped working, I became pregnant again, and after a high-risk pregnancy, we welcomed our rainbow son. Being a mother changed my career completely. I had to put my mental health first.
When my career was supposed to take off, I had to stop. It was extremely difficult to see how everything I had always desired was suddenly impossible to reach. I had to reconcile the idea I had formed in my head about how my scientific career was going to be with my new reality.
Finally, after much thinking I decided I wanted to try to stay in academia, even if my career path was not traditional, so I applied for a Marie Curie fellowship which offers the possibility of resuming your research career after a break. I was granted the fellowship and after a 3-year career break, I started to work in science again at the Estación Biológica de Doñana, in Spain.
Losing our daughter was devastating, changed our life completely, and discovered a reality that we ignored. It also changed my view of motherhood and made me realise that there is not enough support for mothers in general, and especially for working mothers in academia.
I have been fortunate that despite all the difficulties I have always had the unconditional support of my postdoctoral advisors and labs both at the University of Oregon and here at the EBD in Spain. But not everyone is so lucky and there is a clear lack of institutional support. I try supporting mothers collaborating with different groups both related (MadresBiodiversas) and unrelated to science and the life of mothers in academia. Fellowships that allow people to resume their careers after a break, such as the Marie Curie Career Restart that I received, are fundamental to maintain a rich and diverse academic environment. However, we still need to make a lot of progress to reduce gender bias in hiring processes, grant committees and evaluation systems, and in general to improve the institutional support to working mothers in academia.