She was Fulbright Fellow at the laboratory of Prof. Joseph Gall,[5] Carnegie Institution for Science, Department of Embryology in Baltimore, MD, USA, 1990.

She was trained to become a High School Teacher at PUCE, at the time when President John F. Kennedy started the Alliance for Progress Program with Latin America.

One of her professors, Dr. Cándida Acosta, encouraged her to apply for a scholarship to do graduate studies in the United States of America.

Through her, Developmental Biology blossomed in a most unlikely place: Not having any funds to buy Xenopus laevis, she came across a frog, called Gastrotheca riobambae, in the very gardens of her University.

[10] She discovered that addition of urea, which reaches high levels in the pouch, allows eggs to develop outside of the marsupial frog mother.

Eggs of these frogs are very large, ranging from 3 to 10 mm in diameter in different species, and contain the nutrients needed for development up to metamorphosis.

[13] Surprisingly, extension starts only after involution at the blastopore is concluded, demonstrating that these important movements can be dissociated from gastrulation itself.

[14] Her analyses revealed extensive modularity in the developmental processes that guide the blastopore closure and notochord elongation in amphibians, features that correlate with reproductive modes and ecological adaptations.

Part of the neural crest becomes the “bell gills” that form a rich network of capillaries that surround the embryo in the pouch and exchange gases with the maternal circulation, while still separated by the egg envelope.

Eugenia del Pino studied many other marsupial frogs and found a Venezuelan one called Flectonotus pygmaeus that has adapted to its large egg by having oocytes that at early stages have up to 3000 meiotic nuclei in a single cell.

Eugenia's discovery of the amazing biological adaptations of marsupial frogs lead to a famous Scientific American Article in 1989.

Eugenia's life shows us how identifying an interesting biological problem and unraveling its mechanism can bring science to any country that allows for creativity.

Eugenia del Pino established an entire school of Biology in Ecuador focused in evolutionary developmental adaptations.

[20] Eugenia del Pino introduced the field of Developmental Biology to Ecuador and for a long time the PUCE, her home institution, was the only University in Ecuador with a theoretical and practical undergraduate course in this subject,[21] and her laboratory was the only highly productive Developmental Biology research laboratory.