Dear Current and Expected Readers,

First, I’m sorry again for being away for so long. I’ve been extremely busy in the laboratory wrapping up my final experiments for my PhD. It’s an exciting time, and one where the skills of multi-tasking are truly exercised!

In keeping with that desire, I’ve started a group called “Metabolic Engineering & Systems Biology”. I hope you will search for it, read about the content, and join. I think it’s an incredible time to be in that field, whether you’re discussing global alternative energy and chemical manufacturing, or human disease.

I hope to hear from many of you soon!

Cheers,
Manny

First, I apologize for not following-up sooner, but as a soon-to-finished PhD student I’m sure many can appreciate the time constraints. In any case, I wanted to use a blog entry to follow-up on the various questions and comments these series of posts have generated along the way, and also to reaffirm that I will be back to more regular blogging….

First Question:

“I have always been curious regarding the intellectual freedom in strategizing experiments for students in entry level in a corporate company. For example, an RA in his or her own project has a certain degree of intellectual freedom in directing the project. What would be the case in a corporate scenario? Do entry-levels researchers merely translate the higher order strategies into benchwork without input of their own?"

First, let me preface by saying that this is particularly dependent on the specific corporation, division within that corporation, and project team you ultimately join. My experience at Merck Research Labs has been that very young researchers, without a PhD, are given an enormous level of responsibility and opportunity to impact experimental direction, design, execution, and interpretation. However, what perhaps should be clear is that in an industrial setting there is more emphasis put on understanding the larger milestones, and therefore, the entire team is aligned towards meeting that goal. Consequently I feel that the younger staff is often included in “strategy” meetings because upper management recognizes that it’s ultimately us that have to execute the experiments. Again, this has been my experience at Merck, and certainly you will find a large variety across institutions.

Second Question:

“Excellent series of posts. I hope you can provide some advice to me, and other graduate students. If one is interesting in joining an industrial research center, should a recent PhD do a post-doc in academia or industry to be a better job candidate? Also, how can I find more information about job opportunities in industry? One more thing, what companies would you recommend?”

As someone finishing their PhD right now, I get asked this question often since I’m surrounded by colleagues engaged in the same decision making process. I think that there are two prevailing considerations that I would focus on. First, is the subject matter of your PhD. Traditionally, engineering PhD graduates have not required a post-doctoral experience, either in academia or industry, before transitioning into an industrial career. As a chemical engineer, I find this very much to continue to be true, and I’m even finding that less engineers are getting their Master of Science or Engineering degrees, preferring job experience after their BS degree. However, if your discipline is grounded in the sciences, such as biology, chemistry, or physics, then it continues to be common to have a post-doctoral experience. I think if you’re looking to transition into industry following your PhD, that either an academic or industrial post-doc experience is equally good. In general, there are far fewer industrial post-doc programs, formally. One of the most well respected programs is the one offered by Genentech (http://www.gene.com/gene/research/postdoctoral/). This is without question one of the best in the country for the biological sciences and I think rivals the top 20 academic departments in similar fields. Ultimately, though what is always most important is the supervisor you work with and the specific work you embark on. A friend of mine once put it best: During a PhD you are allowed to fail, and it’s often your supervisor’s responsibility to make sure it is not catastrophic. During a Post-Doc you are allowed to fail, and you alone will fail. In other words, a post-doctoral position should be more about true independent research capabilities and developing the skills required for a complete project success – management of funding, personnel, time, or other resources, in addition to state-of-the-art science.

I hope this has helped, and again, I’m sorry for being away for so long!

Cheers,
Manny

Continued from my previous post…

Myth 3: If you join an industrial research center, you can kiss good-bye the exciting days of the pursuit of knowledge, teaching students, working on large consortium projects, or in fact, having individual impact. Essentially, you will be relegated to a number inside what are often large organizations, and find moments of happiness reading the Dilbert Comic Series, only to realize you are Dilbert.

This, while related to Myths 1 and 2, I prefer to take on as an independent myth. For many academics, the over-riding motivation for joining a university research environment is the belief that you have independence and most importantly, supervisory control over the direction of your research. As a former professor at MIT once told me, “The advantage of academic research is that you can study anything under the sun, as long as someone is willing to fund it.” We’ll get back to the second part of this statement, but for now, let’s run with the premise that you can in fact study anything under the sun. The believe is that in a corporation you are hampered, and essentially dropped into very specific research boxes, with defined goals and milestones, which you must meet with no room for exploration. It’s absolutely true that in a corporate research environment you do not operate as 100% autonomous nor can you study anything under the sun. However, to assume it’s the other extreme is also a myth. Do you know what the number one cost for any corporation research department is, by leaps and bounds? It’s you. It’s the people they hire. You are the largest investment they will make, and the hope is that they create an environment that maximizes the productivity, innovation (see myths number one and two for the importance), and creativity of its people, which will translate to maximizing the return on their largest investments. Therefore, the better corporations have realized that they must provide flexibility and opportunities for their best employees to satisfy their inherent scientific curiosity, and where possible develop it. For example, Merck is completely supporting my PhD, which has included a healthy stipend, all tuition and research fees paid for, and a three-year leave of absence to complete the research. There’s no question that Merck Research Labs is able to hire the best PhD graduates directly out of school, without having to pay their education. So, what was the motivation? After all, for those that are doubtful, you would agree that this is not in the interest of pure “wealth generation”. Merck chose to do what they did for primarily two reasons. First, based on three years of performance in a research environment they saw a young employee who had the potential to be a scientific leader and contributor in the organization. They realized that if they were willing to invest in me, that I would most likely be willing to invest in them. Second, they realized that being someone who has seen the inner workings of the organization, and then pursuing advanced research with that perspective, would likely allow me to implement scientific approaches that would best extract value from our existing infrastructure. They didn’t want to take a fresh PhD from graduate school and mold him or her into the Merck system. Rather, knowing the Merck system as it is, what if we sent some of our brightest people to places where they could be exposed to new ways of doing research, and because they had Merck awareness, they could harness techniques and approaches that would realistically be implemented and add value to the organization. Ultimately, people must realize that corporations are in phenomenal competition to hire and retain the best talent, as this is the source of the company’s productivity and innovation. Therefore, unlike the academic myths, corporations who have realized this are more than willing to extensively invest in the desires of an employee.

There is no doubt that I believe strong corporate research environments exist, and dismissal by the academic community is either based on a poor previous experience (certainly, there are poor corporate research environments, just as there are poor academic environments), or based exclusively on what they read in the popular media. One final thought I will leave you with, as perhaps you consider whether to pursue an academic or industrial research career is one that is often over-looked. There are very few corporate research environments where team-work is not a default mode of operation, and particularly for the larger corporate research centers striving to solve ever increasingly complex problems, large multi-disciplinary teams, on the scale of 100 or more people are often assembled. On the other hand, I have found that academic research environments, particularly for young assistant or associate professors, are often individualistic. Of course there are collaborative projects, and perhaps even consortiums that professors are involved in; however, I would say that their interaction is limited to perhaps ≤10 people – one order of magnitude smaller than in corporate research environments. This is of course motivated by the final end goal of each organization. In the academic research community, peer-review and publication of the work is many times the ultimate end-goal. While you may have a team of researchers working on a given publication, it’s ultimately the publication order of names, with the first and last authors, that are coveted. In an industrial research setting the pressure for individualism is less, simply because the end-goal is a product or service that may only be achieved via a large team effort. So, while you may not receive the individual credit that a first or last author would receive on a Nature publication, you will receive significantly more credit than the middle author of a given publication.

As a result of this team-work environment, that is actively promoted, scientists are forced to develop skills that are rarely developed or taught in doctoral studies – people skills. In the most recent edition of Cell (Aschwanden, Vol 132, March 21, 2008), in an article entitled, “Managing to Excel at Science”, there is a superb discussion of that lack of training in management and human resources present in the academic community, and efforts presently underway to supplement this skill set. In an industrial setting, these skills are essential, and more importantly, highly valued. As a result, those academically inclined as a result of their passion for teaching, I would suggest that this passion could easily be applied to teaching younger staff in industrial research groups.

Ultimately, the list of myths and differences can continue on and on, but my hope was to provide an alternative perspective than the one I often hear being spread down the hallways of many universities in the late evenings. So, the next time you go for that coffee or beer, consider all the opportunities available to you, and more importantly, don’t rely on anyone’s word-of-mouth, including mine. Rather, visit the institutions you’re thinking of joining and decide for yourself what is motivating the people you see.

The opinions expressed here are solely belonging to José Manuel Otero and do not represent the positions of any of the parties mentioned in this article.

Continued from my previous post…

Myth 2: Industrial research environments are exclusively focused on generation of wealth. Any attempts to spend resources on longer-term scientific investments, fundamental research, altruistic projects, or efforts to publish scientific findings will be strongly discouraged.

I remember sitting down with a colleague who was in the midst of this decision and he perhaps best described his primary concern: “I am not sure I want to work for the man”. For a vast majority of scientists and engineers we often entered our respective fields because we thought we had the ability to contribute to a body of knowledge that would ultimately result in an improvement for humanity. The thought of working for a massive multi-national, which is often portrayed by the media as being concerned with the latest earnings per share, price-to-earnings ratio, and return on investment far above any good they may be doing, is repulsive. First, let me stress that the media representation of many corporations is just that – their representations. Inside the research divisions of many corporations, and particularly for Merck, which I have experienced first hand, it is utterly ridiculous to suggest that the motivations of the researchers are strictly financial. This is not to suggest that efficiency, cost-cutting where possible and adding financial value to products and services being developed is not a priority. But, it is often times not the primary driver. The primary driver is to deliver products and services with high added value – value that will self-justify the price paid. It’s true that corporations are producing profits, but the profits are not the end goal, they are more often the result of providing incredible value to society. Of course, the very optimistic view point I am expressing is hardly true for all corporations. Therefore, when debunking this myth I always state the stipulation that it’s extremely critical to research the corporations you’re considering joining. Each has its own approach, each has its own atmosphere, and each emphasizes different aspects of the business to drive and motivate their scientists and engineers. Ultimately, the best advice I can provide to any young researcher considering transitioning to industrial research is to interview with a minimum of three enterprises. Use those interviews to see for yourself the environment and people that would ultimately become your colleagues.

Myth 3 to follow shortly….

In my previous blog post I introduced both myself, and topic of the next several blog posts I intend to issue. Here we resume, with a description of what I believe are three common myths amongst the academic community, particularly, recent PhD graduates and Post-docs.

Myth 1: Industrial research environments are not focused on problem understanding, but rather exclusively concerned with project milestones and product delivery, and therefore, will punish any type of mechanism-based efforts towards enhanced and deeper understanding.

This is amongst the most prevailing thoughts of current academics when asked to describe the concerns they have with potentially joining a corporate research and development operation. First, I would like to absolutely refute this common perception, and place it squarely in the myth category. Just as with universities or non-profit research organizations, not all industrial research centers are created equally. However, when you consider the great corporate research centers of the previous two decades, that may include General Electric, IBM, Microsoft, Merck, Pfizer, United Technologies, Toyota, Sony, DuPont, and so on and so forth, these corporations have provided fundamental advancement of the fields they operate within. My PhD is presently in metabolic engineering and systems biology of Saccharoymces cerevisiae, and I don’t think anyone would argue that DuPont, with development and implementation of an industrial biotechnology process to produce 1,3-propanediol – an added value chemical previously petro-chemically produced – has not been pioneers in this field. I can cite examples for each of the corporations I have listed above. While it’s unquestionable that each of these companies attempt to run the most efficient operation possible, to either deliver a service or product, they also recognize that the value of that service and product is directly correlated with the scientific/technical expertise and investment they make. DuPont in striving to develop 1,3-propanediol has also developed an entire library of recombinant DNA technology in microorganisms, a significant portion of which has been published or presented. Similar to an academic environment that is often striving to reach high impact journals, such as Nature and Science, corporate environments are striving to reach the highest value products. And, similar to publishing in Nature and Science, the highest value products are often those requiring fundamental research and mechanism based approaches. As anyone in the fields can tell you, much of the low-hanging fruit, particularly in established fields, has been picked, so innovation is the key to maintaining a competitive market place advantage. I would offer that research centers at the above corporate power-houses I’ve described would rival the respective department of the top universities in the world. You don’t believe me? Take a moment to visit their respective web pages and decide for yourself.

Myth 2 to follow shortly….

By José M. Otero, PhD student and Merck Doctoral Fellow

Until recently, I have resisted the empowering revolution taking place over the world-wide web, where people of all ages, disciplines, backgrounds, and experiences are blogging their stories to anyone who will read them. As a PhD student in biochemical engineering at the Technical University of Denmark (Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark), and simultaneously a research biochemical engineer at Merck Research Labs, Merck & Co., Inc. (West Point, PA), I have been intrigued by the idea of trying to start a blog, but wasn’t sure it would have much appeal to a broad audience, particularly one that was outside the scientific community, until I discovered the Nature Network. I love the idea of the simple, modern, and sexy format offered by the Nature Network for scientists to take a shot at sharing their experiences and providing an opinion on a diverse range of topics, although most clearly have a scientific twist. So, I hope you enjoy this first attempt at entering the world of blogging, and I look forward to future digital interactions with the readership.

While the recent weather would suggest otherwise, we are in fact entering Spring 2008 and not uncommonly, this time of the year offers annual rituals, some welcomed and some not, to a variety of professions. For the graduate students that will complete either their Master’s or Doctoral theses, and Post-Doctoral associates who’s research funding is concluding, the question, “What should I do now?”, begins to occupy much of their late evenings, gradually becoming a central part of their day. This phenomena does not have geographical or educational boundaries, because as someone who has graduate degrees from both the US (M. Eng, 2002, MIT) and Europe (PhD, expected 2009, DTU), I see all types of people struggling to answer the same question. I am perhaps in a slightly more unique position, because while I am a PhD student in every sense, I am also one of those people who decided to leave academia after their Master’s, and spent three years as a research biochemical engineer at Merck Research Laboratories, before heading back to get my PhD. I am completing my PhD as a Merck Doctoral Fellow, so my future is fairly well determined in that I am committed (and looking forward) to returning to Merck. Having been on both sides of the coin, colleagues, friends, and students often try to grab a cup of coffee (US) or beer (Denmark) with me to get my impressions of what an industrial research environment is like, particularly compared to academic atmospheres. However, what I am often perplexed by and spend most of the conversation doing is debasing many of the false pretenses that young academically trained researchers have regarding industrial research. The myths are extensive, and consequently, the result is that students feel they’re left with no option other than to pursue an academic career, when really they are simply basing decisions on false information. And so, let me describe three of the most common myths I hear, which based on my personal experience, are absolutely false.

(To be continued in my next blog session!)