Sarah Briceño

In 2014, Sarah Briceño was finally seeing the fruits of her labor. She had been promoted to a higher-level research job at the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research (IVIC), one of the leading scientific institutions in her home country. She held a PhD in applied chemistry and had published a variety of articles on the synthesis and characterization of magnetic nanomaterials. Her research was going well, and she was making progress on developing new methods of forming nanoparticles for the reduction of nitrogen oxides, air pollutants that are produced when fossil fuels are burned. Unfortunately, while her career flourished, her country began to fall apart. Venezuela plunged into an economic crisis. By 2018, hyperinflation would reach 63,000% annually. “The situation in the country was so difficult that we had to stand in lines from dawn to dusk just to get food,” she says. “We were assigned a specific day each