how to make the most of them

In 2009, Brenda Wingfield completed the sequence of the pathogen Fusarium circinatum — the first fungal genome to be fully sequenced on the African continent — which causes local pine trees to wilt and ooze resin. But the fungal geneticist at the University of Pretoria in South Africa had a problem: she didn’t know how to annotate and analyse a whole genome.

Wingfield found her solution half a world away in the United States, where F. circinatum is also a problem. She trained in these genomics techniques during a sabbatical at the Genome Center of the University of California, Davis.

“That was mind-blowing, learning genomics that I’d never done before,” she recalls. Wingfield brought her new-found expertise back home to Pretoria, where she hosted a week-long “genome annotation jamboree”.

The practice of academic sabbaticals began in 1880 at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and these professional breaks have become a perk of professorships around the world. Sabbaticals of up to one year are typically available to tenured faculty members every seven years, although policies vary by institution and nation. Some companies also offer sabbaticals or similar kinds of leave. Data on sabbatical rates are scarce, and not everyone is able to take advantage. Academics in some low- or middle-income nations, for…