Biophysical Society Bulletin | May 2021

Career Development

Careers in Industry: An Excerpt from the Live Q&A At the Careers in Industry: Live Q&A Session at the 2021 Virtual Annual Meeting, a panel of industry scientists answered audience questions about their careers.

co and University of California, Berkeley that had gone into industry, I was able to get some information there and learn a little bit. I looked online to see what looked interesting to me. The day I went on one particular site was the day they posted the job I have now, so I didn’t actually get a huge survey of what all was out there, but I did learn that there are things out there that are interesting to me and people with my back- ground, and I guess the biggest hurdle, biggest difference, is that it is very much team-oriented work. Even if you’ve done a lot of collaborations in academia, it is a very different process. Drug discovery in particular, it’s very teamwork driven, you cannot do it all yourself within your lab. You need pieces from very disparate groups. The ability to succeed or fail as a team, that is different. Depending on where you are and your func- tion in the company, how much control you have over what you work on can vary. For me, I have a lot of control over what I work on, like professors, but it really can be very different, depending on what your role in the company is. Hirsch: One challenge I had was: in academics, you could do things at your own pace, but in the drug discovery field, there is a timeline you have to meet. There have been a lot of experiments I have wanted to do, kind of off the record, or academic experiments, but sometimes management would prefer that you don’t do that. It’s something that might be nice to know but not important because the ultimate goal in industry is to get a drug. It was a hurdle for me to understand to go from kind of playing with stuff to keep focused on the goal.

The session was moderated by Melanie Cocco of the University of California, Irvine and incoming chair of the Membership Committee. It was chaired and organized by Erin Dueber of Genentech and member of BPS Council. The speakers were Muneera Beach (Malvern Panalytical), Jeff Hirsch (Confluence Discovery Technologies), Aysegul Ozen (Scorpion Therapeu- tics), and Jeremy Wilbur (Relay Therapeutics). Below are the panelists’ answers to one of the questions from the session. Additional questions and answers will be shared in BPS Bulletin in the coming months. Question: What drew you to industry, and what were the challenges in transitioning from the academic environment to industry? What general advice would you give? Dueber: I always give the advice that I didn’t know anything about industry, and how I ended up here was a process of elimination. I really found it useful to get experience and then weed out things I didn’t like. In my postdoc, it didn’t look like a lot of fun writing grants, it didn’t look like a lot of fun with a lot of the things my boss was doing, so I started thinking about what else was out there. I hadn’t really heard anything about industry. Luckily, being in the Bay Area and having a network of alumni at University of California San Francis-

Clockwise from top left: Muneera Beach, Melanie Cocco, Jeremy Wilbur, Aysegul Ozen, Jeff Hirsch, and Erin Dueber

May 2021

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