MobiGrants: New Agents of Brain Drain in Portuguese Higher Education

Emigration is a chronic structural process of Portuguese society. The discussion and key arguments raised in this chapter are mainly focused on data from a research project (Bradramo) on Portuguese skilled emigration; based on the outcomes of the Bradramo project it can be suggested that recent phenomena in general, and the crisis that began around 2008 in particular, profoundly transformed the patterns of Portuguese emigration. Nowadays, the country faces a brain drain dynamic that is dramatically altering the profiles of national emigrants, emigration destinations, self-identity, and the strategies of those who leave the country. The neologism “MobiGrants” is used here to characterise recent Portuguese emigration. Academic mobility, which was mainly promoted by the European Union (through grants from the Erasmus Programme), created and fostered mobility flows that reinforced a latent mobility phenomenon. Once engaged in academic mobility programmes, Portuguese higher education students tend to stay in the country of destination or, upon returning temporarily to Portugal, to evince a very strong predisposition to move to a country of the European Union. Further, this grant-fuelled latent mobility exhibits a clear tendency towards moving between various countries and a very weak predisposition vis-à-vis a possible return to Portugal. Alongside this weak propensity to return, there is a marked refusal to assume a self-identity as emigrants. The profile of Portuguese “MobriGrants” reveals a trend towards a permanent and a long-term (as opposed to a temporary or transitory) mobility, an insertion in the primary segment of the labour market of the destination countries, a predominance of professionals connected to the academic/scientific system and to professions requiring high skills, and a latent mobility (after a period of study in the country of destination) rather than direct mobility flows (after having entered in the employment system of the sending country)

YEASTRACT: providing a programmatic access to curated transcriptional regulatory associations in Saccharomyces cerevisiae through a web services interface

The YEAst Search for Transcriptional Regulators And Consensus Tracking (YEASTRACT) information system (http://www.yeastract.com) was developed to support the analysis of transcription regulatory associations in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Last updated in June 2010, this database contains over 48 200 regulatory associations between transcription factors (TFs) and target genes, including 298 specific DNA-binding sites for 110 characterized TFs. All regulatory associations stored in the database were revisited and detailed information on the experimental evidences that sustain those associations was added and classified as direct or indirect evidences. The inclusion of this new data, gathered in response to the requests of YEASTRACT users, allows the user to restrict its queries to subsets of the data based on the existence or not of experimental evidences for the direct action of the TFs in the promoter region of their target genes. Another new feature of this release is the availability of all data through a machine readable web-service interface. Users are no longer restricted to the set of available queries made available through the existing web interface, and can use the web service interface to query, retrieve and exploit the YEASTRACT data using their own implementation of additional functionalities. The YEASTRACT information system is further complemented with several computational tools that facilitate the use of the curated data when answering a number of important biological questions. Since its first release in 2006, YEASTRACT has been extensively used by hundreds of researchers from all over the world. We expect that by making the new data and services available, the system will continue to be instrumental for yeast biologists and systems biology researchers

Asymmetric Mobility and Emigration of Highly Skilled Workers in Europe: The Portuguese case

Emigration is a chronic structural process of the Portuguese society. Th e discussion and key arguments raised in this chapter are mainly focused on data from a research project on Portuguese skilled emigration. Based on the outcomes of the BRADRAMO on-line survey to 1011 highly skilled emigrants it can be suggested that recent phenomena in general, and the crisis that began around 2008 in particular, profoundly transformed the patterns of Portuguese emigration. Nowadays, the country faces a brain drain dynamic that is dramatically altering the profiles of national migrants, emigration destinations, self-identity, and the strategies of those who leave the country. Academic mobility, mainly that promoted by the European Union (through grants from the Erasmus Program), created and fostered mobility flows that reinforced a latent mobility phenomenon. Once engaged in academic mobility programs, Portuguese higher education students tend to stay in the country of destination or, upon returning temporarily to Portugal, to evince a very strong predisposition to move to a country of the European Union. Th e profile of Portuguese high-skilled emigrants reveals a trend towards a permanent and a long-term (as opposed to a temporary or transitory) mobility, an insertion in the primary segment of the labor market of the destination countries, a predominance of professionals connected to the academic/scientific system and to professions requiring high skills, and a latent mobility (aft er a period of study in the country of destination) rather than direct mobility flows (aft er having entered in the employment system of the sending country)

L'émigration portugaise qualifiée dans le contexte européen

Devant le renouvellement de l’émigration portugaise en Europe, une enquête réalisée en 2014 fait le point sur les représentations que les migrants portent sur leur propre parcours. La distinction de différents facteurs de répulsion pour leur pays d’origine et d’attraction pour le pays de destination permet d’esquisser les nouveaux visages des migrants portugais, plus qualifiés que leurs prédécesseurs, très informés sur les perspectives professionnelles de mobilité. Envisageant leur départ davantage comme une expérience de vie qu’une situation d’émigration, ils contribuent à redéfinir les contours transnationaux de l’Europe contemporaine

Exodus of skills and academic mobility from Portugal to Europe (Portuguese)

The need for deeper knowledge about the complexities of the “brain drain” phenomenon and its increasing increase in the country led to the development of this research. In order to capture this complex reality, a mixed, multilateral methodology was used, using quantitative and qualitative information collection techniques with a view to characterizing the factors of attraction and repulsion in the decision to migrate, allowing the identification of trajectories of upward and downward social mobility, analyzing life projects, differentiated socializations and contrasting strategies for making the most of school capital