Career research-based

To judge an offer you receive or a company where you might like to work, it s important to estimate your prospects for advancement. How any given company cultivates its scientists aspirations is not widely known if it is publicly available information at all. A few companies Web sites do, however, describe their policies. For the most part, familiarity with their practices comes from networking or interviewing, with a notable exception. A. M. Thayer s 1998 essay Dual Career Ladders offers valuable insights into a corporate structure commonplace among research-based companies. 

Ph.D. students must be prepared for the interdisciplinary environment in which they will likely spend their careers as biochemical or biomedical engineers. The best way to do this is to expose them to interdisciplinary research as graduate students. To facilitate this, a broad and stable base of research support targeted at interdisciplinary research must be created. Particularly valuable would be support targeted to... 

Bob s research interests and knowledge across chemistry were great. Throughout his career he retained an interest in biomimetic chemistry, specifically the study of metal ion-promoted reactions and reactions of molecules activated by metal ion coordination. His early interests in carbohydrate chemistry inspired him to study metal ion catalysis of both peptide formation and hydrolysis as well as studies in inorganic reaction mechanisms. He was particularly interested in the mechanisms of base-catalyzed hydrolysis within metal complexes and the development of the so-called dissociative conjugate-base (DCB) mechanism for base-catalyzed substitution reactions at inert d6 metal ions such as Co(III). 

Over the course of their careers, interviewees level of motivation (based on a ten-point scale, ten being the highest) to do research changed considerably. For example, 86% of interviewees indicated that their level of motivation to do research was extremely high (9 and 10) at the time they completed the Ph.D. degree. By the current or last job, the comparable figure was 59%. 

Knowing that the better nonlinear constrained methods are now available, why have researchers generally been reluctant to accept them Perhaps the linear approach has an attraction that is not related to performance. Early in a technical career the scientist-engineer is indoctrinated with the principles of linear superposition and analysis. Indeed, a rather large body of knowledge is based on linear methods. The trap that the linear methods lay for us is the existence of a beautiful and complete formalism developed over the years. Why complicate it by requiring the solution to be physically possible ... 

Mr. Thomson began his career at Dow Chemical and held positions in manufacturing, research and technical support. He had assigmnents in the U.S. and Europe. He holds five patents in synthetic chemistry and process control. He has 11 patents applied for based on his development work with Hydrophilix. 

The primary objective of RTCI is to provide a focused, fact-based insight into industrial research career opportunities and thus help conference participants choose between typical career paths such as... 

In my junior year, I got a summer job with a company later to be called Cleveland Crystal Corp. I published my first paper in Nature in 1959 on the absolute configuration of the cadmium selenide crystal, based on X-ray intensities. I was also interested in computers, but I understood that with the computer I would be working on problems for others whereas I wanted to work on my own problems. Being able to carry out a successful research project with my own hands gave me the courage and the conviction to pursue a career in experimental chemistry. 

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