Academia career

Bucherer, H. T. J. Prakt. Chem. 1904, 69, 49. Hans Th. Bucherer (1869—1949) was bom in Ehrenfeld, Germany. He shuttled between industry and academia all through his career. 

I have been extremely lucky in my career in that I have been exposed to many areas of laboratory Hfe in academia in a government laboratory and in industry, both as a part of large organizations, and, more recently, with my own design and development company. 

Another Cohort V interviewee elected to pursue an academic career after an industrial postdoctoral assigmnent. The interviewee commented 1 have much more space to be creative and develop my own ideas in academia. ... 

Department of Materials Science and Engineering Given became the first program chairman and served until 1969. These details of academia aside, it was at Penn State that Given s career as coal scientist flourished. 

As so often happens in academia, students get the point in their graduate school careers when it s time to go, and although Paul and I sensed that work on this final oxidation was far from over, experimental work on CoQ was put on hold while Paul s Ph.D. thesis was written. His... 

The first thing to note is that the age structure of this group in August 1970 was strikingly concentrated, with 70 percent between the ages of forty and fifty-five. Presumably, most had reached a stage of their careers where they enjoyed a measure of reputational authority and job security. All those who worked in academia had tenure, and all but one was full professor two were department chairs. All but two of those employed in government or private laboratories occupied administrative as well as research positions, for example, as laboratory director, branch chief, or division head. 

Now the members of the manila-envelope-opening committees are the same people who have been generating the 20 percent—and higher—fraction of women Ph.D.s since 1985. Why have these faculty not wondered why more of their women doctorates were not applying to academia That discrepancy should have made the faculty on the manila-envelope-opening committees wonder what that said about their department as a place to create a career. What does that lack of curiosity say about their ability as... 

This is academia. We have the most flexibility of any job, and yet here we are saying that if s easier in industry to have children. I do not understand this. When my children were born, I was at home, and I had group meetings at home—we have computers now, and we have all kinds of means of communication—so I was gone for just a month or two. Now, I have never taken a sabbatical—which is my personal choice—but I have colleagues who were on sabbatical, and I could not tell because I hadn t seen them in 2 or 3 years anyway. These are all side tracks off the main issue of integrating your life into your career. It is so terribly discouraging that for some reason academia is not perceived as a wonderful... 

Industry appears to be more family friendly, so the question became, Why One issue that was raised had to do with retention. Retention is very important in industry. In academia, if a faculty member leaves, you soon have a pile of 200 applications sitting next to you to fill that one job slot. So retention takes on a different character in academia. You want to retain someone if they bring in a lot of money and have national recognition or if they bring something important to the institution—but that may not come until later in their career. In industry, there is a greater push to retain people once they walk in the door. This leads to policies that are more supportive of the community on issues—child care is one—that have been on the back burner for many academic institutions. 

Barbara J.W. Cole, University of Maine Listening to the comments of the last few days, it struck me that I have been in academia for 14 years—my whole career, right out of graduate school—and why on earth am I here There has been a lot of very negative talk about the academic life, particularly for a woman faculty member. 

P G s reward and recognition system is best exemplified by our dual-ladder system for promotion. Employees in R D will choose, early in their career, whether to advance as a technical expert or as a manager of science. Both are equally valued, and this is important, so there is no stigma associated with one choice or the other. The management path for promotion is traditional and basically resembles all other industrial corporations, as well as the tenure track promotion system in academia. But the key here is that such a promotion system is public, not personal and private. It goes beyond a handshake and a raise and awards titles to individuals selected for advancement. Our titles include such terms as section head, associate director, director, company officers, etc. Others may use different titles, but the title used is far less important than its symbol, namely, the outward recognition of personal success. 

But that does not mean you just give in to the industrial sector and assume you cannot be effective in attracting new people. Academia needs to understand how to sell themselves. Emphasize the positive and go at it very aggressively by letting recruits know they have choices when it comes to an academic, government, or industrial career. It all comes down to choices. 

D. Ronald Webb No, we do not track them but that might be interesting to do. I know many of them go on to industry, for example, Dow, DuPont, and Pfizer. Others have chosen academia as a career path, with one of our most recent RTCI alumni accepting an assistant professorship at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. But I cannot speak for all of our former RTCI participants. 

Dr Stephen Kelly is a leading name in the field and has reported the synthesis and properties of liquid crystals in an international research career spanning 24 years in industry and academia. 

Scientists can work with industry either from the secure confines of academia or by joining industry. Since a large number of research students are at least tempted toward a career in Pharma or Biotech, it is important for scientists— the students and their mentors— to understand the differences. From such understanding come insights into successful collaboration on drug discovery. 

Albert Eschenmoser (b. 1925 in Erstfeld, Uri, Switzerland) is Professor, Emeritus (since 1992) of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich and a member of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California (since 1996). He received his Diploma and doctorate at the ETH in 1949 and 1951, respectively, and spent his career at the ETH. I mention only a few of his exceptionally large number of honors. He is a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A., a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (London), and a member of the Academia Europaea. He received the Robert A. Welch Award in Chemistry in 1974, the Davy Medal of the Royal Society in 1978, the Arthur C. Cope Award of the American Chemical Society in 1984, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry (Israel) in 1986, and the Paracelsus Prize of the Swiss Chemical Society in 1999. One of Professor Eschenmoser s latest publications reviews his recent interests [Eschenmoser, A. Chemical Etiology of Nucleic Acid Structure. Science 1999, 2S4, 2118-2124]. We recorded our conversation on September 6, 1999 at the ETH. ... 

I have had the good fortune to have many outstanding associates. Some have had, or are making, successful careers in industry, others in academia. To mention a few, in no particular order, who became professors in universities around the world Paul Wender, Paul Grieco, Samuel Danishefsky, Ian Paterson, Clayton Heathcock, Clark Still, Jacqueline Ficini, Jiro Tsuji, Minoru Isobe, Takashi Takahashi, and many more. 

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