Career Shifts: From Academia To Industry, And Vice Versa

In 1986, after 30 years with Merck Sharp & Dohme Research Laboratories, chemist T.Y. Shen took an early retirement. But he wasn't settling down to a life of leisure. After a successful career in industry, Shen wanted to take a stab at becoming an academic scientist. I enjoyed my career at Merck very much, first in research and later in administration, he says. But I wanted to do more research and enjoy an academic life in a second career. As Shen's experience shows, just because a scientist starts on a career in industry does not mean that he won't ever be able to start a new career in academia. And the reverse is true, too. Many scientists who have successfully made these major career moves report that the transition can be made smoothly and that the switch has helped to rectify what they believed were gaps in their work experience. Shen received a Ph.D. in organic chemistry at the University of Manchester, England, in 1950, and then continued with postdoctoral fellowships at Ohio State University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1956, he accepted his first full-time position as a synthetic organic chemist at Merck, the pharmaceutical giant based in Rahway, N.J. The years that followed were full of achievements for Shen. He rose from the bench to be head of the department of synthetic organic chemistry and, eventually, vice president of membrane and arthritis research in the pharmaceutical division, the title he held when he left the firm in 1986. Shen began his belated career in academia at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where he was appointed Alfred Burger Professor of Medicinal Chemistry. He was already familiar with the University of Virginia; several years before, Merck had helped found its chemistry department's subspecialty in medicinal chemistry. Today, Shen is very upbeat about the career change he made four years ago. The transition from industry to academia was an easy one, he says. He stresses that for him, the science remains unchanged: From the technical point of view, medicinal chemistry is the same whether the research is being done in an academic or an industrial setting. What varies, he says, is the amount of pressure. In academia you have freedom of research, which is very nice, Shen explains. You don't feel the same sort of pressure as you do in industry to produce but also to maintain the company's posture in its field. Shen says that having the opportunity to interact with young people is one of the best features of his new academic life. As a member of Merck's senior management, he enjoyed the companionship of longtime colleagues with similar levels of experience and achievement, but he rarely interacted with junior scientists. At Virginia, he says, he thrives on working with both graduate students and postdoctoral fellows: There's a great deal of satisfaction in seeing them grow up scientifically. It's almost like seeing members of your family grow up. Another chemist, Ralph E. Christoffersen, made the opposite switch, leaving a top position in a university for one in industry. Christoffersen was president of Colorado State University, a position he reached after moving through the ranks of academia. Christoffersen completed a Ph.D. in physical chemistry at Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1964. Then, like Shen, he went on to complete two postdoctoral fellowships, one at the University of Nottingham, England, and one at Iowa State University. His field was computational chemistry, which he describes as one of the predecessors of today's biotechnology field, the area in which he would eventually make his mark in industry. In 1966, Christoffersen accepted his first academic position as an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Kansas. In subsequent years, he climbed up the academic ladder at Kansas, eventually becoming a full professor and then vice chancellor of academic affairs. In 1979, he left Kansas to become president of Colorado State University, where he also taught biotechnology. He stayed in Colorado until 1983, when he left to accept a position with the Kalamazoo, Mich.-based Upjohn Co., a firm he had worked with as a consultant for more than 10 years. Christoffersen went to Upjohn to initiate a biotechnology research program. Among his responsibilities were setting research goals, recruiting a scientific team, and introducing new products. To Christoffersen, the Upjohn opportunity was so exciting that he passed up the chance to be considered for other university presidencies in order to join the firm. But although the Upjohn offer represented a chance to do stimulating work, Christoffersen says the main reason he decided to make a career change was the increasingly dismal funding opportunities for academic scientists, particularly at universities that have experienced a decrease in enrollment. Most funding is based on a head count, Christoffersen explains, and with declining enrollment and the growing federal deficit, university administrations are undergoing a management of decline they are learning how to shrink. The situation at Upjohn was the inverse. I was going to build a program. After successfully building the biotechnology program at Upjohn, Christoffersen left the company last year for a greater challenge: merging the research efforts of two giant companies, SmithKline Beckman and Beecham Group PLC. Now, Christoffersen is vice president of research at the one-year-old SmithKline Beecham, based in Philadelphia. He joined the company two weeks after the merger. Christoffersen says his current charge is to combine two ongoing, effective research programs into one organization that is better than either was before, while not giving personnel from either organization an upper hand. It's interesting and hectic, he says. The opportunities and challenges are very exciting. Christoffersen says his communication skills, which he believes he sharpened in his previous life in academia, have proved to be all-important in industry, as well. The ability to effectively communicate with audiences of different kinds is enhanced by the teaching experience, he says. But also, as an academic administrator, it was necessary to communicate, manage, and administer people, programs, and resources. I'd say that academia is identical to industry; you just change the titles of the people and the types of problems they're dealing with. However, Christoffersen says, although the problems are similar in academia and industry, the resources available to solve problems differ. In public universities, you move forward by consensus-building and leadership, which can be very time-consuming. In industry, it's the opposite. Accomplishments can progress more quickly, he says, because the decision-making process is very well defined. Deadlines and time pressures also differ in the two settings, according to Christoffersen. In industry, management makes a promise to produce specific products and services according to a time line. In academia, it's much more open-ended. Robert L. Heinrikson was one of the scientists Christoffersen recruited to the biotechnology team he assembled at Upjohn. Heinrikson left his position as professor of biotechnology at the University of Chicago to join the firm. Like Christoffersen, Heinrikson had had a successful academic career, although he had remained out of the administrative arena. After completing his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1963 and then a postdoctoral fellowship at the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University), he did a one-year stint at the Medical Research Council of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. He returned to the United States in 1966, after accepting a position as assistant professor of biochemistry back at the University of Chicago. He received tenure six years later. In 1985, upon Christoffersen's suggestion, Heinrikson decided to leave Chicago to join Upjohn. I felt I had had it with university life, Heinrikson says. I didn't care for teaching anymore. Grant money was harder and harder to get. I had had it with Chicago. My kids were grown up and in school; I thought it was time for a quieter life. Upon his arrival at Upjohn, Heinrikson was given the title distinguished scientist, the highest research position in the company. He says he is happy with his career move, although he believes that industrial scientists have traditionally been treated as second-class citizens by their counterparts in academia. Despite that, he says, in industry the general feeling is that scientists who have made it in academia, which is a tough stream to swim in, in terms of work, grants, initiative, and creativity, are assets in a company. Another reason scientists with an academic background are considered useful in industry is that most bring with them an international reputation and international contacts, Heinrikson explains. Although the distinction between academia and industry has blurred somewhat in this regard in recent years, companies can become insular they can't always publish, they don't travel in the same circles, he says. Although he has made the switch to industry, Heinrikson still makes time to remain active in lecturing, at Western Michigan University and Kalamazoo College as well as at international biotechnology meetings. You can become stale working for too long in a particular environment, Heinrikson says. I never look back with any regret on my change. Chuck Tatum, director of corporate research at Philadelphia-based Rohm & Haas Co., made the same switch Heinrikson and Chris-toffersen did, but he made it a lot sooner. Tatum's career started somewhat tumultuously. In 1970, he started a Ph.D. program at the University of California, Los Angeles. One month after Tatum began his studies, his professor died unexpectedly. Instead of opting to be reassigned to another professor, as the other students in his group were doing, Tatum left Los Angeles and went to Denver, where he accepted a position in the pathology laboratory of General Rose Memorial Hospital. In addition to his lab responsibilities at the hospital, he helped train medical technologists. Two years later, Tatum decided to return to graduate school, this time to Penn State University, with the intention of studying biochemistry. Four years later, in 1976, he finished his Ph.D. in bioorganic chemistry. Tatum was uninterested in doing a postdoc. Instead, he contemplated accepting one of several positions that were offered to him, representing a wide spectrum of industrial, government, and academic institutions. Eventually, he decided on a tenure-track assistant professorship at Middlebury College in Vermont. Tatum says he was attracted by the chance to work in a college that was similar to the school he had attended as an undergraduate. I wanted to teach in a small, liberal arts college, like Amherst College, where my own interests were so strongly shaped, he says. Yet he recognized the limitations of doing research at Middlebury. While the school offered a master's program in science, there was no Ph.D. program. That's one reason Tatum left before he had the opportunity to obtain tenure. But Tatum also felt that doing research at any university even a large institution had its drawbacks. He believed that in academia he would have to select projects on the basis of their ability to be funded and that he would always have to be working to maintain a continuous flow of funding. In addition, Tatum says he discovered that in academia it would be difficult to do cross-functional research or collaborate with people in the same field, which is the name of the game in industry. Industry focuses on teams, Tatum says, while academic institutions value the individual. In 1979, after once again considering many different options and different settings, Tatum accepted a position as a senior scientist at Rohm & Haas. The specialty chemical company was attractive to Tatum because of its informality in terms of research interactions, he says. Tatum remembers that his academic colleagues didn't understand the switch he was making. They were relatively unsupportive, he says. He adds that most people he knows who move from academia to industry do so after being turned down for tenure, a situation that prompts more sympathy than the route he took. He acknowledges that he did have culture shock once he arrived at Rohm & Haas. Industry is far more safety- and environmentally conscious than academia, he says. In addition, he says he discovered that the corporate world is much more structured, with systems in place for every company activity. It takes some getting used to. Despite his initial culture shock, Tatum quickly rose within the ranks at the company. He worked at the bench for two years and then held a variety of administrative and business jobs before he reached Rohm & Haas' top research position last year. Tatum says he misses teaching, but doesn't have the time to juggle a teaching appointment along with his responsibilities at Rohm & Haas. But he is able to keep his hand in academic science planning by sitting on committees at Middlebury College as well as at the University of Pennsylvania and at Montgomery County Community College in suburban Philadelphia. Like Tatum, Ilya Raskin made a switch early in his career. He left industry for academia, but it wasn't because he wanted to teach. After completing a Ph.D. in plant biology at Michigan State University in 1984, Raskin says he felt lucky to get a job immediately at Shell Agrichemical Co. in Modesto, Calif., without having to do a postdoc. Later, the Wilmington, Del.-based E.I. Du Pont de Nemours & Co. Inc. bought the division from Shell. Raskin spent a total of five years in industry, but he says he knew it just wasn't going to be right for him in the long run. I was always very interested in the fundamental areas of science, Raskin says, in the esoteric, long-term sense. Ultimately, he felt a university environment would be able to provide resources to enable him to pursue these interests. While Raskin has no complaints about the time he spent in industry, he felt his interests would be better served and his contributions greater in academia. So he let the word out about his intentions among academic circles. Because Raskin was fairly well published, prospective academic employers already knew his name. Peter Day was one of these potential employers. He himself was recruited by Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., from the British government's Plant Breeding Institute in Cambridge, England, to begin the Center for Agricultural Molecular Biology, based on the Rutgers campus and funded by the state of New Jersey. Day was charged with assembling a biotechnology team, and he was interested in recruiting Raskin. The former Du Pont scientist joined the center's staff last September. As all these scientists can attest, taking a first job in industry does not mean that it will be impossible to ever obtain a position in academia, and vice versa. Whatever their decisions, more scientists are exploring different options at different stages in their lives and finding that a varied background can be an overall asset to scientific productivity, no matter what the setting. Lisa Simon is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia.

Career Shifts: From Academia To Industry, And Vice Versa

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