Dr Cristina Banks-Leite
Senior Lecturer, Department of Life Sciences (Silwood Park)
As part of a series on the people behind our world-leading research, we meet an Imperial ecologist whose work is helping preserve biodiversity in Brazil's precious forests.
Surrounded by forests
When I was growing up in Brazil, doing the equivalent of A-levels, I was definitely interested in ecology, but I also really liked physics, I really liked geology, and I really liked psychology. I just wanted to understand things: be it the human mind or space or the Earth and its life.
I really wanted to understand where all that biodiversity came from, and where it was going.
But I also grew up surrounded by a lot of forests – the Atlantic forests of Brazil – which have suffered great losses in habitat since the arrival of European settlers. That drove me to appreciate ecology more than the other topics – I really wanted to understand where all that biodiversity came from, and where it was going.
While I was doing my PhD on the ecology of tropical forests at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil had a really wonderful initiative, which was to give money to PhD students to do part of their PhD abroad. That's when I first came to Imperial – I did one year of my PhD here, and I really liked it, I found the community so vibrant, so interesting. As soon as I finished my PhD, I only applied for postdocs here in the UK, and eventually got a position at Imperial in 2010, where I’ve been ever since.
Conserving species
My research focuses on understanding what drives species to extinction, and what happens to the environment when those species go extinct. These results can then be used to inform policy.
One of my biggest successes in this area was when my research into conservation of Brazil’s Atlantic forests was published in Science, showing that we need at least 30% of forest cover to preserve biodiversity. I remember when I first saw those results, I just stopped for about 30 minutes thinking, ‘Oh, my God, I can't believe that I finally found consistent responses across all these different species’.
That felt the closest to a ‘eureka’ moment.
Most of the time in research, things just slowly come together, shaping up until one day they become something quite big. But that felt the closest to a ‘eureka’ moment.
Those results have now influenced three different pieces of policy in Brazil. One was a federal law that created priority maps for restoration in Brazil. The other two were state laws in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Our results were part of a picture that showed increasing forest cover would not only improve biodiversity, but also prevent droughts in these regions.
My main interest now is to try to understand why some species are really impacted by environmental change and why others are not. I'm trying to figure out why some populations are more sensitive than others within a species, and to what extent we can use this to create better predictions of biodiversity loss, and more informed ways of preserving species.
Representation makes a huge difference
As a researcher, I’ve faced many challenges because I am Brazilian. The first challenge really was language – it's not easy to be eloquent in a language that you're not a native speaker of! But also, I'm a Latin American woman and there were lots of other issues that came along with that. For example, a lot of my successes were attributed to men around me. As I'm a bit more established now, these issues are a little bit less evident, but it was something that really impacted me, particularly at the start of my career. I know that it's not necessarily going to stop here, but I feel like I'm slightly more prepared to deal with it.
We place too much emphasis on people, but people aren't perfect.
Representation makes a huge difference. It's really hard for us to understand a problem when we're not affected by it. I don't have any disability, so I can't imagine what life is like for people who have disabilities in academia, but if we had more disabled people working with us we would know what is not right, what we have to change, and in what way.
I've been asked a few times whether anyone has inspired me, and the more I think about it, the more I feel a little bit uncomfortable with it. We place too much emphasis on people, but people aren't perfect. I've come to realise that what inspired me the most were books or ideas or initiatives, not individuals.
Enjoy the process of research
My first bit of advice for those considering a career in research would be to stay off Twitter! There can be a lot of complaining about academia, and I'm not saying that stuff’s not true, but only the bad parts of it are promoted. I myself have never had such horrible experiences.
Academia is a hard path to go down. But it can be a lot of fun.
Being a researcher can be a really rewarding experience, but it's also very challenging. And because the number of highly qualified people just keeps increasing, but the number of positions doesn't, the number of people that will be able to continue their careers as researchers is reducing very quickly.
My advice would be, while you're doing research, just try to enjoy as much as you can rather than thinking: ‘If I don't continue my career as a researcher, it's a failure'. It's not a failure. If anything, it's the default. But there are so many places where you can use the skills you gained: industry, government or NGOs, for example.
Academia is a hard path to go down. But it can be a lot of fun.
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