Harvesting Ideas: Dr. Celina Noé Amato on Crafting Circular Bioeconomy in Agro-Industry

3. Describe your research topic in three words.

Reuse and recycle biomass.

4. A good bioeconomist needs…?

…to be aware that production systems that use biological resources and waste have social and environmental impacts, not just economic ones.

5. What does a typical (work) day look like for you?

Early in the morning, I drop my children off at school and then I go to my office at the National University of Cordoba, which is a 15-minute drive from my house. I spend a couple of hours reading, writing and thinking. Of course, I have a few conversations with “mates” – my colleagues from the Management Institute. Then I pick up my children from school and continue working at my house. A normal working day is about 8 hours but sometimes I work a lot more because I have a deadline, and sometimes I work less. 

5. What keeps you motived in your work day in and day out?

Passion for my work. When I was a child, I told my mother that I wanted to work for a company that would pay me for study. My mother did not finish school, so she did not know anything about research positions, but she always encouraged me to follow my dreams. Today, I think I am in my dream job because the state pays me to study and to learn.

6. What or who inspired you to become a researcher?

One of my childhood friends has a mother who works for the university and she has always been an interesting person for me because I like to know a lot about what she does. At least she was the only person I knew who worked for an academic organisation before I went to university and discovered the academic world for myself.

Then my first formal job was in a university and it was there that I met one of my inspirational people who is now like a mother to me. Although she was not a researcher, she always worked in education and she inspired and encouraged me to pursue my academic career.

7. If you could travel in time: in which epoch and at which discovery or event would you have liked to have been there?

I would have liked to have been at the beginning of the industrial revolution, trying to convince people, as some writers tried to do, that this revolution would be a disaster for the planet if we did not take into account its environmental impact.

8. What is the best experience you have had as a scientist / researcher?

The best is to see my work and research being applied for the people/community/industry that I had selected as an object of study. I mean, that feels like really changing society!

9. How did you survive your PhD time? What advice and tips do you have for future PhD students?

I think I have survived thanks to my children, because they have accompanied me through every process of my PhD, sometimes in my womb, sometimes as newborns or as walking beginners. So, I have not had much time to think about how to survive, I have just survived.

I always talk a lot with my doctoral students, whom I advise, about the need to connect with other ‘softer’ ways of getting away during the doctoral period. It is very useful to do sports, outdoor activities, or some artistic activities (singing, painting, playing an instrument). It is necessary to take some time to not think in terms of authors, papers, objectives and methodology. Although it seems to be a waste of time, these activities open our minds and bring new ideas to improve our different processes during the PhD.

10. What do you consider the greatest achievement in the history of your field?

In the field of management, I think the greatest achievement was when human behavior theories came into the analysis about efficiency in the firms.

11. What is your favorite research discipline other than your own?

Sociology and psychology.

12. Which (historical) important scientist / researcher would you like to have dinner with? What would you ask?

I would like to have dinner with one of the scientists from the Club of Rome, I don’t have a specific name in mind, but any of the people who created and developed that think tank would be very interesting to me. I would ask them how they dealt with the media in those years when they started talking about environmental disasters and so on, and the media insisted on showing a very different world, even calling them mad scientists.

13. What direct or indirect relevance does your research have for society?

The indirect relevance of my research is based on the fact that the bioeconomy and circular economy are part of the local, national and global agendas of current debate. Waste recovery contributes positively to several Sustainable Development Goals of the UN Agenda 2023, while promoting job creation and organisational capacity building for economic, social and environmental sustainability.

In addition, the direct societal relevance of my research is given by the dissemination of practices that add economic, social and environmental value to the bio-residual product of different value chains. This contributes to various private and public bodies in the generation of local guidelines for public agendas, sectoral policies and frameworks for the promotion of the bioeconomy and circular economy. At the same time, it provides information for decision making to the stakeholders that are part of the value chains for the development of bioeconomic strategies, avoiding open landfills or incineration of the bio-waste.

Finally, my research contributes with some insights related to a big problem in my region, as the waste issue is in Latin America.

14. What do you like most about the “lifestyle” of a scientist / researcher? And what least of it?

I like studying a lot all the time and that no two days are the same. I also like sharing my research topic with other people (in formal and informal ways of scientific communication).

I do not like very much that some people in my country think that researchers from my field (social sciences) do not do science. People have questioned our real contribution to science. So sometimes I have to spend a few hours trying to demonstrate why our work is necessary for the advancement of the scientific social world. 

15. Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

In my city, with my family, working for academic or research organisations around the world that have the same goal as me: there is no Planet B, we are all agents of change, “be the change you want to see in the world” (M.Ghandi).

16. If you had a daughter, what would you advise her not to do?

I have a daughter! I have always told her that there are no limits if we dream with something. The path for women is changing, it is becoming more equal, but nothing will be better than relying on our own abilities.  

17. How would you explain your research area and topic to a child?

All the organic waste left over from your parents’ cooking at home (e.g. eggshells, vegetable or fruit scraps) can be turned into other products or raw materials for other processes in everyday life, even into energy. This is the bioeconomy, the transformation of waste and bio-based resources so that they can be reused in other processes. For example, you could compost the organic waste from your household and use it to fill the flower pots at home; or, with a little more technology, you could buy a machine that converts it into energy for your own home.

These actions not only help the environment by keeping these resources out of landfill, but also save money by producing our own soil for plants or energy to run our homes.

The large-scale bioeconomy contributes to improving the economic, social and environmental impact of the different production processes that integrate biological resources or waste in a territory.

18. What is the biggest challenge for you when it comes to balancing family and career?

For me, the biggest challenge has been not to compare myself with other colleagues in the short term. Our careers are very different from researcher to researcher, more so than when you decide to have a family. Sometimes in the short term we are provoked to compare ourselves with others, and that is very damaging to us, also because the system makes us compare ourselves all the time.

19. How do you master this / these challenge(s)?

I think understanding that there is research and there are times for everyone is a challenge and also a way to balance family and career development in research.

20. How often do you as a friend / partner / mother / daughter feel guilty when you have to meet a deadline – again?

I never feel guilty when I have to meet a deadline, my life is a deadline.

21. How do you keep your head clear when you are stressed?

Doing pilates or yoga, and singing in a choir. And, of course, sharing fun moments with my family, especially outdoor activities.

22. What makes you most happy about the world?

Observe nature in action: animals in their natural habitat, flowers in bloom, leaves on the trees (especially when they fall off in the autumn), the sea, etc.

23. Which of your traits bothers you the most in your daily work?

I’m very talkative and sometimes that’s a trait that bothers me because I go on and on about different things in a conversation. We call that “going through the branches (of a tree)”, I don’t know if you have a colocation for that in your language.

24. And which of your traits help(s) you the most in your daily work?

But at the same time, I’m a very organised person and I like structures, so it helps me in my daily work to organise my work and my family affairs according to some structures.

25. What was your biggest research disaster? What did you learn out of it?

Because I am a social researcher, I have not had any major disasters like people who work in a laboratory. But if I think about something that I have learnt about past research, maybe I have wasted some years doing research on some objects of study that then did not use any information that I generated. So, I have learnt that it is a necessity to really know what the social needs of society are in order to contribute to those needs.

26. If time and money were no object: Which research project would you like to do?

Biodiversity conservation projects in Latin American natural protected areas.

27. How did you imagine the life of a scientist / researcher when you were a high school student?

When I was at high school, I had no idea what scientists were like. But I certainly did not imagine that they would look like me today.

28. Is it actually different? In what way? 

Yes, it is. Because I never imagined that people like me could be scientists. I was born into a middle-income family and no one in my family had an academic background, so I am the “black sheep”. But now I can understand that all you need is to have clear goals about what happiness is for you (it includes what your happy job is).

29. If you were the research minister of Germany, what would you do to improve the situation of women in science?

Oh, what a responsibility! I would try to put a quota for women in every process related to research in the country. So, women have to make an effort to fill those quotas, and they see that they have more opportunities to access different positions. These quotas are in fellowships, grants, public research positions, fees related to the Ministry of Science and so on.

30. What is your favorite place to relax from research?

Countryside and mountains nearby my city.

31. What are the advantages and disadvantages of doing a remote-WiRe-fellowship?

For me, I can only see the advantages of my remote-WiRe-fellowship, because if it was only face-to-face, I would not have had the opportunity to apply. The disadvantages of working remotely are that you don’t meet people from the university, and you don’t live in Münster, so you don’t know the culture and the people. But in my case, I will be in Münster for a few weeks, so I´m trying to avoid these disadvantages.

32. f you could change one thing about the academic system in which you have last done research in, what would it be?

In my country, the main problem in the academic system in terms of research is the budget. Like other Latin American countries, we suffer from social and economic problems that are more urgent to solve (e.g. insecurity, health, poverty) than those related to research. So, the public budget for research is always low. I would like to improve the funding for science and technology, but I know that this is not easy and sometimes not feasible in my country.

33. What was the funniest moment you had in science ?

The funniest moments are always going to conferences abroad. I have had several anecdotes with my colleagues on our academic travels.