Ngoc Nguyen, recipient of the FLUXNET Secondment Program award, has completed the program and wrote the following to share with the FLUXNET community:
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Summer 2025, I reflected on my Milano experience…in late summer 2023….
6 a.m. I breathed in the humid air of a subtropical summer, something deeply familiar that I had only experienced in my home country, Vietnam. After spending four years in Colorado and two in the Bay Area, I finally found myself in another place both hot and humid, but not Vietnam. Instead, I was on a different continent, a continent that remains a mystery to me with full of excitement.
I was a 24-year-old, third-year PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, trying to find an answer to my research question of how to model soil rain-induced respiration pulses, a non-steady-state ecosystem process that has remained challenging to model at a global scale, driven by tiny organisms called microbes. I played around with FLUXNET data more than a thousand times, with endless days of running experiments and reading papers spanning the past 50 years. There was a paper that I was deeply interested in, and that paper was led by Mirco Migliavacca, who later became my supervisor during the FLUXNET Secondment visit, at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of European Commission, located 30 miles from Milano. His paper from 2011 was trying to semi-empirically model ecosystem respiration from eddy-covariance data, taking into account water availability and different environmental dynamics, being creative beyond the conventional nighttime partitioning method of modeling respiration as solely a function of temperature. After reading this paper long enough, I know that to answer my research question, I needed to find Mirco and visit him in Europe.
Luckily, Mirco was doing his postdoc at Harvard at the same time as my main supervisor Trevor Keenan. This connection made me more than excited to apply for the FLUXNET Secondment Program to get funding to visit Mirco in two months. This experience changed my life and how I view science. Well, for important things, it is good to reiterate; the FLUXNET Secondment program changed how I view science, which leads to a fulfilling reward that my paper just has been accepted in principle at Nature Geoscience- 1.5 years after the visit and four years after I entered graduate school. My first paper ever would not have been possible without the support from the FLUXNET Secondment Program.
Mirco picked me up at the Milan International Airport at 6 a.m., along with his five-year-old son, who also woke up early to welcome me to Italy. I’ll never forget the dense, multi-layered forests that lined our journey from the airport to Ispra, home to the European Research Centre, where I’d conduct my research for the next two months. As a young adult experiencing life’s possibilities, I felt an exhilarating stream of joy and curiosity about both scientific exploration and everyday European life.
I stayed in a one-bedroom complex designated for visiting scholars, just across from the research center, which housed inactive nuclear facilities. Due to its past nuclear research and strict policies, entering the facility involved extensive paperwork, especially for foreigners from certain countries. At the gate, someone humorously referred to me as a “rare species”—a Vietnamese citizen representing a U.S. institution. My mornings typically began with a cappuccino and a croissant from the cafeteria near the research center—a habit that quickly became my daily breakfast. Ispra was a tranquil countryside town, distinct from bustling, fashion-centric Milano, abundant with trees, biking paths, and perhaps too many mosquitoes.
During my visit here, I met so many wonderful science souls, who cared about my research and took care of me so well during my visit. I can never say how much I appreciated the warm welcome of senior scientists I met at the European Commission Research Center, who gave a PhD student like me a lot of guidance and interesting science stories that remain impactful until now. I was, unfortunately, sick for a week during my visit, and when I could open my phone, a lot of messages and missed calls from colleagues, with mosquito patches and repellents brought to my desk by Mirco and the head of the Forests and Bio-Economy Unit – Ms. Greet. Such compassion towards my youthful inexperience significantly matured me as both a person and a scientist.
here, I got a chance to meet Mirco two to three times per week, discussing science with him full of notes on the white boards. We have been trying to model ecosystem respiration globally in a more comprehensive way that considers different environmental influences. I pursued two projects: one specifically addressing ecosystem respiration during rain pulses, and a broader one exploring ecosystem respiration modeling across diverse global conditions. The latter one is still ongoing and will require much more effort, but now I have the connections and know what people I can seek for help.
Beyond Italy, I was fortunate to connect with esteemed scientists at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany, who also focus on global ecosystem respiration modeling. Thanks to Mirco’s past leadership at Max Planck, I was introduced to Markus Reichstein, the Director of the Biogeochemical Integration Department at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry, and received an invitation to spend a week there. As a PhD student with no prior scientific publication, the only confidence I brought with me was my passion for research and my dedication to answering the research question I have always been curious about.
I gave presentations both at the European Commission Joint Research Center and the Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry. I met the core scientists behind FLUXCOM, the famous global estimations of carbon and energy fluxes upscaled from eddy-covariance, meteorological, and remote sensing data.
I met the people whose names I previously only saw in papers, such as Markus and Martin Jung. My presentation at Max-Planck lasted for two hours, with a lot of constructive questions from peers and senior scientists. I felt so lucky that as an early-career scientist, I got these unique opportunities that even in my dream I could never ask for. Everything went so smoothly and I lived my dream here. My colleagues at Max-Planck took care of me well, from Wantong Li who I met a year ago in AGU, to Xin Yu, my teammate at Fluxcourse in Colorado summer of 2023, to Wenli Zhao, who I always ran into in conferences in the Netherlands, Chicago, and now in Germany. They are not just colleagues, but they are a part of my science journey and memories. I was lucky to be selected as a FLUXNET Secondment Program recipient, and was lucky to meet my peers and colleagues in a different continent outside the U.S.
I finished my visit to Ispra, Italy and came back to the U.S. to take my Ph.D. qualifying exam. Now I miss Italy because it has become a part of my lifelong memories. I missed having cappuccino three times per day, the playful teasing for ordering cappuccinos at lunch, and the sushi restaurant I frequented in Ispra. I missed hiking and parties with my colleagues’ families, and the beautiful landscapes near the Italy-Switzerland border. On the day I came back, I received many sweet presents from Mirco and colleagues at the research center, a lot of wishes and thrilled notes that I have always kept and displayed in my office in Berkeley.
Upon leaving, Mirco and my colleagues gave me sweet, heartfelt presents and notes, which have been displayed in my Berkeley office. This journey turned out to be one of my best international experiences—a carefree time that only had me and science.
Now, in 2025, I wish to return to Milano.
By Ngoc Nguyen – Check out my academic website at https://ngocnguyen99.github.io/