Filipino Scholars in the Netherlands: Finding Their Place, Opening Doors for Others

Part One | Finding Their Place: Filipino Scholars Building Academic Lives in the Netherlands

From medical imaging to colonial history, Filipino researchers are developing specialised expertise abroad while confronting questions of access, recognition, and belonging.

WORDS MYE MULINGTAPANG

PHOTOS COURTESY OF FiSch NL

An international conference can put a Filipino scholar in a room full of people who understand their research—and still leave them as the only Filipino there.

For Mary Chris Go, a PhD candidate at Leiden University’s Institute of Advanced Computer Science, that experience is familiar. Her work focuses on the real-time reconstruction of X-ray image data, a specialised field in which collaboration crosses geographical boundaries. Her academic journey has taken her from a BS in Applied Physics at the University of the Philippines in 2020 to a master’s degree through the IPCVai Erasmus Mundus programme in 2022, followed by a brief research position in Singapore and doctoral research through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie project RELIANCE.

“I have often attended conferences where I was the only Filipino in the room. I would not necessarily describe it as a barrier, because I have generally found it easy to connect with researchers from different cultures, which I think reflects the adaptability and openness that Filipinos are often known for.”

Her account offers a useful starting point for understanding how Filipinos find their niche in academic life abroad. There is the individual work of mastering a field, developing a research question, and joining an international conversation. There is also the question of who gets access to those opportunities in the first place.

“The bigger challenge for Filipino researchers, in my view, is the access to specialized training, research facilities, funding, and international networks. There is a lot of talent in the Philippines, and expanding those opportunities can help more Filipino researchers enter and thrive in such fields.”

Academic life abroad is shaped not only by research, conferences and professional milestones, but also by the relationships formed along the way. For Filipino scholars in the Netherlands, finding others who understand both the demands of scholarship and the experience of living far from home can make belonging feel less distant.

Talent alone does not provide laboratory facilities, international funding, or a professional network. Go’s distinction matters because a celebration of Filipino adaptability can too easily leave those conditions out of the story.

A Philippine history in a Dutch university

For historian Bianca Angelien A. Claveria, finding an academic home abroad has brought a recurring question: why study the American colonial Philippines in the Netherlands?

Claveria is a PhD candidate at Leiden University’s Institute for History and a member of COMET: Human Subject Research and Medical Ethics in Colonial Southeast Asia, an ERC Starting Grant project. She won the National Commission for Culture and the Arts’ 2023 Young Historian’s Prize and was awarded research fellowships from the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine and the Rockefeller Archive Center in 2026.

Her research examines physician-patient medical encounters in the American colonial Philippines. The location of her doctoral programme may initially seem distant from her subject, but she describes how it has expanded her research possibilities.

“From interdisciplinary conferences to transnational research collaborations, being in the Netherlands has profoundly enriched my perspectives as a historian. Moreover, the experience has also compelled me to think strategically and creatively when searching for my historical sources.”

She points to a resource that readers might not expect:

“Many might find it surprising to know that there is actually a relatively untapped wealth of Filipiniana in Dutch university libraries and collections. One just needs the patience and fortitude to look for them.”

Those opportunities come with an awareness of unequal access. Claveria describes her position as a privilege, recognising the difficulties fellow Filipino historians face in accessing foreign collections, securing international research funding, and finding tenured positions abroad.

Her research also gives these questions a longer historical perspective. She studies Filipino physicians and medical students who sought further education in the United States during the early twentieth century, including government-supported pensionados. In her account, their opportunities were shaped by selection processes, institutional needs, competition, and proximity to influential people.

The historical comparison raises a question for the present: how can advanced education become accessible to more Filipino scholars, rather than remain an opportunity available to a limited few?

Filipino researchers and professionals come together in a setting that reflects the growing connections among scholars working abroad. Their varied academic and professional paths point to a broader question explored in this feature: how can international opportunities become more accessible to Filipino talent?

For Enrico Joaquin Lapuz, whose research interests centre on Digital Humanities, finding a scholarly direction has involved looking again at how Filipino lives appear in colonial collections. He received his bachelor’s degree at Ateneo de Manila University and his master’s at Leiden University, and works as Web Content Coordinator for the Humanities Across Borders programme at the International Institute for Asian Studies.

His research on colonial exhibition photography follows individuals whose lives can be obscured when images are read only through broad categories. That approach has helped him explore interactions with other Indigenous groups from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, opening possibilities beyond a single colonial narrative.

A mentor’s question continues to guide that work:

“A mentor of mine asked me last year when discussing my research, ‘For whom are these histories written?’”

It is a question about purpose as much as method. Academic advancement gives researchers opportunities to produce knowledge; Lapuz’s account asks whom that knowledge will serve.

The life beyond the research

Finding a niche does not resolve every difficulty of living abroad. Andal identifies uncertainties around visas, residence permits, employment contracts, and the possibility of staying after a research position ends. She also names racism, precarious work, competitive funding, and limited career pathways.

“And then there's loneliness.You can have an impressive CV, a calendar full of conferences, and a respectable publication record while quietly missing home.”

That proximity between professional achievement and personal isolation helps explain the impulse behind Filipino Scholars NL, or FiSch NL. The new network seeks to bring together Filipinos dispersed across Dutch cities, universities, disciplines, and career stages.

Andal describes its starting point plainly:

“At the most basic level, we wanted to find each other.”

The ambitions include exchanging ideas, sharing opportunities, and exploring collaboration. But the need is also social: finding people with whom an explanation can be shorter, a joke more familiar, and an admission of exhaustion immediately understood.

“Sometimes you just want to say, ‘Grabe, pagod na ako,’ and have someone immediately understand the implications of that statement.”

For scholars building demanding academic lives in another country, that recognition has its own value. A research specialism may establish a place within a discipline. A community offers somewhere to bring the rest of one’s life.

In Part Two: How can a new network turn those connections into opportunities for Filipino scholarship and future researchers?