Ushma Neill, the vice president of scientific education and training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), never expected to work in academic administration. “I have had an entirely accidental career in terms of all the choices and positions that I have gotten into,” she said. When she finished a postdoctoral fellowship at Imperial College London, where she studied vasculature in a frog model, she checked an item off her bucket list by moving to New York to search for another postdoctoral position, expecting to follow the path toward becoming a principal investigator. She decided to apply for a temporary assistant editor position with Nature Medicine while she explored postdoctoral options. Six months turned into two years and sent Neill on a new career trajectory—moving from the bench to the boardroom to guide scientists on their research journey.
Serendipitous Connections to a New Career
As an assistant editor, Neill evaluated the manuscripts that researchers submitted and oversaw the peer review process for them. She also attended scientific conferences. During one meeting, she met Andrew Marks, a cardiologist at Columbia University and, at the time, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI). This otherwise typical introduction presented Neill with her next job opportunity when Marks contacted her two weeks later to be the journal’s executive editor.
Ushma Neill leverages her science background to promote science training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
“That was a very easy choice, because I really did enjoy being an editor,” Neill said. However, the JCI’s editorial board moves its base every five years. Eleven years after she started as executive editor, the board moved to North Carolina. Besides being a more difficult commute, Neill also started to wonder what more she could do in her current role.
Around this time, Neill attended the New York Academy of Sciences annual gala, where she spoke to Craig Thompson, a cell biologist who had just moved to New York and taken the position of the president of MSKCC. “He made me an offer I couldn’t refuse to come back into academia myself and into the president’s office at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center,” Neill said.
In this position, Neill learned about governing boards, institution finances, and managing multiple levels of politics. She was involved in recruitment and fundraising efforts and overseeing aspects of the hospital’s operations. “It was a lot of drinking from the fire hose, especially at first,” she said.
Although she enjoyed her role overseeing so many parts of MSKCC, her work did not have a strong science component, and she was eager to bring this aspect back into her day-to-day. “The nice thing about the view from the cockpit was that I could see the landscape of this entire institution,” Neill said. This vantage point became an opportunity for a new role; Joan Massagué, then the director of the Sloan Kettering Institute, oversaw research at MSKCC, and realized that he needed someone to oversee the educational side of the institution’s scientific mission. Neill was ready to be that person.
Together, the two created Neill’s current position to act as a point person for educational programming at MSKCC. “Our idea was to have somebody be able to get their arms around all of the different educational aspects of an institution that is as complicated as MSK…to truly make them shine and make this the best possible place for somebody to come and get training,” she said.
Finding a Place in Academic Administration
In her current role, Neill oversees many educational programs that MSKCC offers. One change that she implemented was to align some of these courses, such as summer research opportunities for undergraduate students, to be pipelines to positions at MSKCC. “We’re able to truly keep a lot of those summer trainees and get them excited about applying to our graduate programs,” Neill said. Additionally, she coordinates programs for high school students to promote their participation in research and reach underrepresented students.
Neill also oversees mechanisms to support the trainees and science staff at MSKCC. This can include assisting individuals with affordable housing, finances, mental health resources and health insurance, or childcare. “How are we providing [support] such that people can truly flourish in the lab, but also in their lives,” she said.
Neill said that there are about 1,500 trainees across MSKCC. Although she doesn’t interact with all of them, she said that she interacts with many of them who come by her office to get advice or to talk about their day. She provides mentorship on several career and professional development-related topics, including conflict management, self-advocation, handling authorship concerns and paper rejections, and facilitating community. She also connects trainees with alumni for informational interviews and shares opportunities that may be of interest to certain individuals.
Although she took a meandering path to her career, Neill said that for trainees interested in a position in administration, becoming involved in their academic community, such as student government boards or clubs, is the best place to start. “Don’t just be a participant, be a leader,” she said.
She encouraged individuals to interact with their deans and program chairs and bring up items for the administration to address or what new seminars would be helpful. “Having people who volunteer to be a representative of the whole and getting to know the leadership, that's a really great start towards figuring out, like, do I like this? Am I good at it? Could I envision myself doing it,” she said.
Although she no longer works in the lab, Neill said, “I don't think that I could do the job that I have right now if I didn't have that background.” She continues to stay up to date on science topics through seminars and journals. This current familiarity and her past lab experience help her to identify important topics for trainee education. “I know what's necessary to be an effective scientist,” she said. “I organize courses…that I think our scientist trainees need here in order to be successful. So, I don’t think I could be successful in my role here without having been a scientist.”
However, her place in administration surprised even her, and it wasn’t a position she ever thought about pursuing. “You think that it’s some bureaucrat that is stamping papers and an unnecessary step between here and there,” Neill said.
Since stepping into the world of administration, though, she’s realized the amount of work and people like herself that are needed to keep academic and research institutions operating. From inception to execution, Neill handles multiple behind-the-scenes elements for the programs that she oversees. “Administration is not a dirty word,” she said.
In addition to being familiar with the needs of a scientist, Neill explained that she’s translated several other skills from her time in research to her current role. From building and working as a team to recording and reviewing metrics for insights into the data, the skills and lessons from her science training help Neill keep the MSKCC community on track.
In her administrative role, Neill said that making science work for others is the most rewarding part of her job. She recalled trainees to whom she got to announce their acceptance to MD/PhD programs or who tell her about career advancements, “There's no greater gratification than seeing people achieve their goals and knowing that maybe you had some small part in it. It's terrific.”
Since the time of this interview, Ushma Neill took a new position as the chief of staff to acting president Claire Shipman at Columbia University and also serves as vice president, Campus Alignment.
