Should I return to my home country after my PhD abroad?

The advice

First, you are far from alone. Your story will resonate with thousands of scientists from low- and middle-income countries who are studying in the Northern Hemisphere. It is natural to feel conflicted, but, in the end, everybody must choose a path.

Nature’s Careers team spoke to three researchers who have already made this difficult decision. They all agree that, no matter where you end up, you can still work towards building capacity, bolstering research infrastructure and mentoring early-career scientists in your home country. At the same time, you can expand your international scientific network to nurture your career in any country.

Returning to your roots

Dimas Dwi Laksmana, a chemist turned sociologist at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta, decided to return home in 2021 after completing a PhD in sociology in Germany. He describes seeing a “a power imbalance” during his studies, whereby scientists from wealthy countries visit lower-income ones for short-term research projects and publish their findings — perhaps hoping that their published papers will become policy recommendations for countries in the global south. But “the reality is not that simple”, he says. Even with sometimes large investments, this sort of ‘parachute science’ does not have a lasting impact on the local communities, he says, often because the researchers are culturally detached from them. Doing a PhD project on organic farming in rural Yogyakarta, Indonesia, helped to convince him to return to the country permanently, he says.

Decolonizing science toolkit

Laksmana says he returned to be part of the movement to decolonize science — that is, to undo the marginalization and erasure of local and traditional knowledge that colonialism, racism and parachute science have triggered in global research. “I can contribute more by being a university lecturer in my home country.”

In a paper published by Nature Ecology & Evolution (T. Rivera-Núñez et al. Nature Ecol. Evol. 8, 1559–1560; 2024), a group of early-career researchers from Mexico highlight the benefits of south–south collaborations between locally based researchers and communities. But they also point out some potential downsides: academic job scarcity, administrative burdens and intense pressures from local universities to publish as many papers as possible. These drawbacks can hamper efforts to produce high-quality research in their home country, they write.

Laksmana anticipated this. So, in addition to researching academic jobs in Indonesia and their salary ranges, he looked into the levels of administrative bureaucracy that would be involved. He advises you to do this homework, ideally before your final PhD year. This will help you to set realistic expectations and prepare you for the transition in research culture that a move to your home country would entail.

Keep your current connections

Returning home could be challenging for scientists from low-resource nations who have spent years in countries with advanced technologies and higher salaries, says Daniel Zhigila, a botanist at Gombe State University in Gombe, Nigeria. For example, the basic salary for a university lecturer is the equivalent of US$170–380 per month in Indonesia, $120–580 in Vietnam and $160–460 in Nigeria. In Indonesia, this might stretch to as much as $800 per month when combined with other forms of remuneration, such as teaching and administrative pay.

University research funding in low- and middle-income countries is also often severely limited. In Indonesia, the government allocated $72 million of research funding for its 303,000 university lecturers in 2024. An annual funding scheme allows early-career lecturers to earn small grants of up to $3,000 for a 7-month research project. Many say that these financial limitations prevent them from doing high-quality research. In Nigeria, the situation is similar. The federal government approved just $3.3 million for the country’s research in 2025. Moreover, bureaucratic red tape complicates researchers’ access to these funds, says Zhigila.

An ‘agony aunt’ for working scientists

But Zhigila stresses that low funding levels shouldn’t mean an automatic ‘no’ to returning home. One way to mitigate these problems, Zhigila says, is to stay connected with well-resourced global-north scientists, proactively building a network to ensure collaboration opportunities. Such a network helps scientists to continue working on their research interests and develop an international portfolio. “The globe is becoming a village,” he says. In 2024, Zhigila secured a fellowship at Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum in Boston, Massachusetts, to do genomic analysis of African plant samples, an opportunity that he found online. His work there will add African-based knowledge to the Western-dominated field of botany. Such collaborations not only support scientists’ individual careers but also connect institutions across borders.

Zhigila advises PhD students thinking of returning home to be resourceful and to seek collaborations wherever they might find them. After the fellowship, Zhigila returned to Nigeria, where he met a German researcher doing fieldwork. Their discussions brought him another opportunity. With support from the World Academy of Sciences, a global organization based in Trieste, Italy, Zhigila spent three months this year at the Humboldt University of Berlin, investigating how climate change affects plant distributions in Africa.

In the Nature Ecology & Evolution paper, the Mexican researchers warned that even situations such as Zhigila’s, in which a global-south researcher’s work is supported by a global-north funder, could still create power imbalances. To ensure that they have a significant role in research design, and that their collaborations are fair, scientists in low-income regions must assertively communicate their observations and analyses to their colleagues from richer countries, says Zhigila. Research studies and methodologies in global-south countries, for example, should “emanate from global-south researchers themselves”, because they are the ones who know the situation best.

Don’t feel guilty for staying abroad

Deden Rukmana urges you not to feel guilty if you decide to remain in Finland. Rukmana, who researches homelessness, health disparities, food security and environmental justice and has a teaching role at the University of Texas at Arlington, left Indonesia 18 years ago. He says it is natural for global-south scientists to desire a job in the global north, but acknowledges that many in your situation want to go back home at some point “after they have built up a lot of networks and resources”. Returning as an established researcher, he adds, creates opportunities for younger generations in their home country.

But building a career elsewhere does not necessarily mean neglecting a home country. Rukmana studies homelessness in Miami, Florida, but says that Jakarta is always in his mind. He has published 40 articles and book chapters, some of them about planning megacities in low- and middle-income countries, and the challenges of urban planning in Indonesian cities. He is also active in the Association of International Indonesian Scientists, occasionally coordinating with Indonesia’s Ministry of Research and Technology to find potential collaborations between overseas and home-based Indonesian researchers. “This is the beauty of global-south scholars: they are the connectors of the two worlds,” he says.

Finally, missing a mother’s home cooking, as you do, is an important consideration, says Laksmana: “Family is definitely number one.”

Researchers must decide which pull is stronger, returning home to spend time with family, as Laksmana and Zhigila did, or staying abroad, bringing their loved ones to be with them and making memories in a new country, as Rukmana did. “I’m so grateful for the decision to bring them with me.”