JAMAICAN-BORN professor, Ingrid Tulloch, is championing the cause of encouraging young academics to return to the island to share what they have learnt overseas. But she confesses it has not been an easy course.

The professor of neuroscience and psychology at Stevenson University in Baltimore, Maryland, told the Jamaica Observer that, despite the odds, she remains committed to swaying minds in the direction of their ancestral home.

“I have also had a few Jamaican students in my classes, and one just recently graduated with a master’s degree in forensic science and I am trying to convince her to go back to Jamaica because there is a serious brain drain issue there and that is a concern,” said Tulloch.

But while some of those she has tutored along the line of returning home are willing to do so, there are pressing issues that often stymie any such move.

“That (remuneration) is definitely an issue, but when I was looking, I didn’t even look at the salary. I was more concerned with whether or not a position was available so I could offer my expertise. But I am sure it would be a concern for many, and that is an issue everywhere now,” said the professor.

Tulloch, 44, who was born in Portland and who left Jamaica for the USA as an 11-year-old, said there is a glut of black Americans with PhDs in the USA, so many of them have been forced to look at possibilities overseas.

“There is just not enough jobs for people with PhDs even in the USA; so it’s a lot of competition, so with that salaries don’t rise as much as the surplus of professors,” she reasoned.

Tulloch, buoyed by her self-claimed sense of patriotism, said she has made numerous overtures to possibly get a job in Jamaica, but it has not been easy in her case because of the unique nature of her area of specialisation.

“I have thought of it (working in Jamaica) when I was finishing up my postdoctoral training and I was looking for a job. I knew I wanted to be in academia, I knew I wanted to teach, and helping to train the next generation of neuroscientists, and I looked at the UWI (University of the West Indies, Mona).

” I even had a conversation with an uncle about coming back and doing something forensics-related, but forensics is not my specialty. I think I would better serve Jamaica as a researcher and a teacher of researchers,” she told Career & Education in Baltimore recently.

Tulloch said with the rate of migration of Jamaica’s skilled and educated people moving on to proverbial greener pastures, the country will be at a critical deficit. Therefore, it will be of great urgency to get the traffic of educated people going the other way.

“If they (US students) are going back, then I think it will be fortifying the base. If they can be role models to say to others that they can come here and excel and do well, then that’s good.

“A lot of faculties of colour, a lot of black PhD students tend to be from the Caribbean, and in that sense it’s a very positive thing, but if they are not connecting back to their country of origin, then I would be concerned about that,” Tulloch ended.