Category Archives: Science Careers

Transferring Skills to Tech Transfer

Dermot Leonard’s first experience with technology transfer was as a mechanical and manufacturing engineering student in 2002. He and his teammates at Queen’s University in Belfast, U.K., won £10,000 in a Northern Ireland Science Park competitionfor their business plan to develop and market a self-powered medical pump. The invention never made it to market, Leonard says: The team took a half-hearted stab at marketing their idea–but then they graduated. They spent the rest of the money paying off student loans.

Continue reading Transferring Skills to Tech Transfer

If At First You Don’t Succeed, Cool Off, Revise, and Submit Again

The sting of rejection was just as sharp the fourth time around for Marcus Bischoff, a postdoc at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge , U.K. “There’s a lot of disappointment,” he says, when your manuscript gets rejected by a journal. After a year of trying, he was both relieved and pleased when the fifth journal–a “good journal,” he says–accepted his paper.

Continue reading If At First You Don’t Succeed, Cool Off, Revise, and Submit Again

Geoscientists in High Demand in the Oil Industry

Six years ago, would-be lawyer Kira Diaz-Tushman heard a National Public Radio program about the impending retirement of senior U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) geologists. “I thought, ‘That sounds fun. I want to do what they’re doing and play around in the field.’ ” So she double-majored in geology and political science at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and did a summer internship at USGS.

Continue reading Geoscientists in High Demand in the Oil Industry

Creativity and Persistence Overcome Failure

Science Careers KouzaridesTony Kouzarides tells the story of his early career as a comedy of errors. He started his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. in 1981 studying the cancer-inducing potential of human cytomegalovirus. After a year of inserting part of the virus’s DNA into target cells, the cells showed almost no signs of cancer. He couldn’t rule out that other parts of the virus might do it, but he also couldn’t publish his early results. What he could publish by the end had more to do with genetic sequencing, an area he did not want to pursue.

After a short postdoc at Cambridge sequencing cytomegalovirus, he landed a second postdoc in a lab in New York studying oncogenes. There, he spent 2 years developing an unconfirmed and unpublishable hunch. On the strength of that record, he deadpans, he unsuccessfully applied to lead his own research group.

Continue reading Creativity and Persistence Overcome Failure