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After years of teaching, scientific and medical research, and working for medical communications agencies, medical device companies, and a vaccine manufacturer, I retired. Now I work with investigators who need help writing about their research because English is not their first language. I’m in northern New Jersey, the “Forgotten Coast” of the Florida panhandle, or travelling in the USA or Europe, depending on the time of year.

I got a Bachelor of Science in biology, decided to go on to graduate school, and “Truckin' like the doo-dah man … what a long, strange trip it's been.” A degree in science may be needed to label you a scientist, and a degree of some sort was required for being paid to do the things I did every day all day. Most of those things were not anything I’d been trained to do. The keywords were “background” and “experience” and “I think I can do that,” which led to an interview (AKA audition) with an employer who was willing to take the same risk that I was taking. More about that later.

My first job was not as a scientist, but as a middle-school science teacher in a private school, and I started graduate school as part-time student. I became a full-time student after receiving a teaching fellowship, which included tuition remission and a stipend in exchange for teaching undergraduate laboratory classes. My research was on the early stages of animal development in chickens and frogs, and that led to a post-doc study of intercellular communication and locomotion in slime molds of all things. Some of the observations that I reported have been cited by other investigators. I worked for a while as a research fellow at a medical center coaxing cells in resected malignant solid tumors to grow in the laboratory. Some of those cell lines and the antibodies we made against them are still being used.

I had planned on a career in academia, but after 5 or 6 years as an assistant professor I decided that it was not for me.* My first job outside of academia was with a medical device company. I gave seminars to clinicians about the clinical studies that were done with our products and kept in touch with investigators. I then worked for a reference laboratory that did immunohistochemical staining and gene rearrangement analysis for pathologists and oncologists. The laboratory was a startup venture, and when it became profitable it was bought by a publicly funded company. I moved on to work in medical communications companies that developed continuing education programs and provided writing and editing assistance and publication planning for “big pharma” companies and their products. After that I moved to “the other side of the desk” working in the medical affairs department of a vaccine company. I coordinated and assisted in the publication of vaccine studies that were conducted in countries outside North America and Western Europe and I facilitated relevant training programs. I retired from that job and from corporate life but continue to work as a freelance editor and writer.

*Go to Biocareers (https://www.biocareers.com/featured/newsletter/) for all you need to know about postgraduate life science careers outside of academia