Thought Leadership - NYAS

A bird's eye view of tractors and combines working in a farm field.

Researchers are improving crop traits by conserving their undomesticated relatives.

Published May 1, 2020

By Carina Storrs, PhD

In the 1960s, some wild beans were collected from the sides of roads and other patches of wild land in Mexico and stored in aluminum pouches in freezers at one of the seed banks maintained by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), in Pullman, Wash. There they stayed for the next four decades until 2012 when Paul Gepts, Ph.D., a professor of plant sciences who had just taken over the grain legume breeding program at the University of California, Davis, exhumed them.

Gepts reasoned that the archival beans, originating from plants growing in dry regions, might be more drought tolerant than their domestic cousins, an important trait considering that most of the farmed beans in the world face drought stress. After growing the seedlings in a greenhouse in the dead of winter to simulate the long nights where the plants grow in Mexico — and crossing the wild plants with domestic varieties — Gepts and his colleagues hit upon a new line that thrived and produced high levels of seed even under the stingiest of irrigation conditions.

An “Insurance” Policy

It’s just one example of the desirable traits that food crops we depend on can derive from the wild relatives they descended from. But much depends on collecting and properly preserving those wild relatives in one of the nearly 2,000 seed banks around the world. “I call it insurance. You don’t know when you are going to need [a crop wild relative], but once you have it you are pretty glad,” says Gepts.

***Paul Gepts, Ph.D****., in the greenhouse at UC Davis.*

In another example, during the 1980’s, scientists at CIAT, a research organization in Colombia that also maintains a seed bank, realized that wild beans collected from a different part of Mexico in the 1960s, harbored resistance to weevils, a serious pest that can decimate dried bean seeds. “When you put these kinds of stories together … it paints a picture of diversity that is still present in the wild types, but that has been left behind in the domesticated types,” Gepts says.

Farmers have been selecting plants for qualities such as high crop yield for thousands of years. Exactly what kind of diversity a wild relative has is impossible to know until researchers working with the seed banks start growing it, and examining such traits as crop yield, drought resistance or taste. Increasingly in recent decades, researchers have also been studying the seeds using single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analysis.

Deposits to the Seed Bank

To bring more diversity into those seed banks, the USDA and governments of many countries with high agricultural production, as well as international groups, fund trips to collect crop wild relatives, often targeting parts of the world that have not been well explored. In many cases, they are racing to get there before plant habitat is lost to development and climate change related threats.

Although collection trips have been widespread since the 1960s, researchers have typically focused on locating wild ancestors and taking a few individual specimens from accessible areas — hence the popularity of roadside collections. In the early 1990s, Gepts participated in a USDA-sponsored trip to collect wild beans in Bolivia, but the team was forced to leave some terrain un-sampled because it was too difficult to traverse. “In many parts of the world, researchers need to return to the same locations repeatedly to do more thorough collections of plant tissue as well as study the impact of local environments upon the plants,” said Gepts.

***Colin Khoury, Ph.D.,*** *participates in a trip to document wild chile peppers in southern Arizona.*
*Photo: The Lexicon and the Global Crop Diversity Trust*

Researchers have put some rough numbers on how well crop wild relatives are represented in seed banks, and generally they support the assertion that we need to collect more. Out of the approximately 1,000 taxa, or broad categories, of wild ancestors in the world, an estimated 30 percent of relatives of a total of 63 crops cannot be found in any of the plant repositories; another 24 percent are only represented by samples from fewer than 10 different populations.

An Unexpected Silver Lining

An unexpected silver lining of the research, however, is the finding that crop wild relatives might be a bit better conserved in nature than in seed banks because much of their habitat is within national parks and other protected areas. “[But] a plant being in a protected area does not actually mean that a particular type of plant is all that protected. [Unless these plants are managed], people not paying attention to them, might think they are weeds [and] try to eradicate them,” says Colin Khoury, Ph.D., who studies crop diversity for CIAT, (International Center for Tropical Agriculture) part of an international agriculture research network called CGIAR, (Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research).

Khoury was involved in studies estimating conservation of crop ancestors. Along with stepping up efforts to collect and store plant materials in seed banks, Khoury says that we need active management programs to ensure conservation of crop wild relatives in protected areas.

Fewer Farmers Growing Fewer Crops

Another source of crop diversity is the crops themselves, both the commonly farmed varieties that acquire mutations as they grow and the so-called landraces, or ancestral varieties of domesticated crops that some farmers still cultivate. Unlike their wild relatives, many of these varieties have been stored in seed banks by researchers and farmers, as their importance for breeding crops with new traits has long been recognized, whereas the traits that wild relatives can lend crops is comparatively unchartered territory.

***Denise Costich, Ph.D.,*** *in the CIMMYT vault where they store the corn seeds.*
*Photo: Teake Zuidema*

Although it might seem reasonable that farmers could handle conservation of these crops just by growing them in the field season after season, seed banks play an important role because there are “fewer farmers growing a smaller number of plants,” says Denise Costich, Ph.D., a senior scientist and head of the maize collection at the germplasm bank, which archives seeds and other plant tissue, at International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), a Mexico-based CGIAR center.

Research by Costich and her colleagues found that many farmers in Morelos, a state in central Mexico, stopped cultivating landrace varieties of corn over the last half century in favor of hybrid varieties, which are less genetically diverse but often produce higher yield and have other economically advantageous traits. In addition to conserving germplasm, CIMMYT and the other CGIAR seed banks, as well as certain government-operated seed banks including the USDA system, share plant materials internationally with academic researchers and private companies working to breed varieties with new traits.

The Need for Seed Banks and Experimental Field Stations

***Seth Murray, Ph.D.,*** harvests new inbred lines of maize with his undergraduate and graduate student researchers. These inbred lines have been selected directly from corn varieties from South and Central America (tropical varieties) and from crosses with germplasm from elite varieties from the Midwestern U.S. (temperate varieties).
*Credit: Texas A&M AgriLife Research.*
*Photo: Beth Ann Luedeker*

As important as it is to collect germplasm from crops and their wild relatives and maintain them in seed banks, it is only half the story. It is critical to grow these seeds in experimental field stations and characterize them so researchers know which ones have desirable traits and have them at the ready to breed with crops, in case of an emergency such as southern corn leaf blight, which wiped out much of the U.S. corn in 1970, says Seth Murray, Ph.D., professor of soil and crop sciences at Texas A&M University.

“Otherwise it’s just like having a library where nobody is reading the books,” he says. These efforts are happening to some extent. For instance, Costich’s team at CIMMYT has characterized most of the corn samples they have added to the germplasm bank vault in the last decade. The USDA does some characterization, but “given the value of agriculture and crop diversity, there is definitely not enough money spent on that,” Murray says.

Computer Algorithms to Study Corn

The work of trying to breed new varieties can quickly grow to an unmanageable scale. In his applied breeding program, Murray crosses U.S. corn varieties with crops that were collected in Mexico and South America, but then has to test their progeny in many different field conditions over several years to understand how they behave under different environments before they are ready for farmers.

In research that earned him the recognition of Finalist for the 2019 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists, Murray and his collaborators have been using drones to photograph plants as they grow, and developing computer algorithms to analyze the images to make predictions about the crop’s yield and other properties. According to Gepts, who has also turned to drone surveillance to monitor bean plant traits, it is not enough to have an ever-expanding font of crop genetic diversity to scour for new traits.

“The other trend is making breeding more efficient whether it is through the use of drones or different ways of phenotyping progenies,” he says.

Also see: Better Data Mean Betters Food

A New Approach to Studying Aging and Improving Health

An illustration depicting a woman aging, from a baby to an elderly woman.

Researchers explore the physiological mechanisms of aging with the ultimate goal of improving healthspan.

Published March 11, 2020

By Hallie Kapner

When mechanical engineer Carlotta Mummolo, neurobiologist Eleni Gourgou, and neuroscientist Teppei Matsui were teamed up in the Interstellar Initiative — an international mentorship program for early-career investigators — their first task was finding common ground.

Eleni Gourgou, PhD
University of Michigan

“We have such diverse backgrounds that I initially joked we were speaking different languages,” Mummolo said. “Overcoming that challenge was fun and exciting, and with the help of our mentors, we found a research direction that unites our expertise.”

Presented by the Academy and The Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development, the Interstellar Initiative recently concluded the second of two workshops for this year’s participants.

Organized around the theme of Healthy Longevity, the workshops challenged researchers to develop a plan for exploring the physiological mechanisms of aging, with the ultimate goal of using their findings to improve healthspan, or the time during which a person is healthy.

We spoke with the winning team about their forthcoming grant proposal, the importance of international collaboration, and their advice for young scientists.

Describe the area of research your team is pursuing.

Carlotta Mummolo, PhD
New Jersey Institute of Technology

Teppei Matsui, PhD, University of Tokyo: We chose to focus on age-dependent changes in the relationship between motor behavior and cognitive behavior.

Eleni Gourgou, PhD, University of Michigan: Carlotta is an engineer and roboticist whose work mostly focuses on humans, Teppei is an expert in brain imaging in rodents, and I study neurobiology using roundworms as a model system. These organisms are very different when it comes to the complexity of the nervous system, behavior, and how they experience aging. We looked at the questions we’re addressing in our own research, then tried to find a common thread that allows us to use three different organisms as three different approaches to address the same target. That thread turned out to be locomotion and cognition.

TM: By bringing this problem to the abstract level— motor behavior versus cognitive behavior as a function of age—we can study different animals within the same framework.

Carlotta Mummolo, PhD, New Jersey Institute of Technology: This is the novelty of our project, because assessments of motor and cognitive performance are usually done separately. But we wanted to integrate them and look for a methodology that translates across species.

EG: The final research proposal is still taking shape. We will continue to work on it, then submit it to an international funding agency.

Mentorship by senior scientists is central to the Interstellar Initiative–how have your team’s mentors shaped this experience?

CM: For early-career scientists, mentorship is everything, and that’s true even more so in this case. Our mentors—Frank Kirchhoff of the University of Saarland and Haruhiko Bito of the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Medicine—pushed us to broaden our mindsets and step out of our comfort zone to find a unified approach. We’d also like to thank mentors Lawrence Hunter, Sofiya Milman, Mahendra Rao, Ikue Mori, and Meng Wan for helping shape our research idea.

TM: Mentorship is very important, and Interstellar Initiative mentors are prominent researchers who have experience with both obtaining competitive grants and reviewing grants. In the first meeting, we received valuable advice about to make our project more appealing and convincing to grant reviewers.

CM: One of our mentors told us something that I’ve kept in mind throughout this project—she told us to focus on integration, innovation, and impact. That was very helpful.

How can international collaborations help further scientific careers and scientific discovery?

TM: Biology is becoming a “big science” these days, and it is necessary to form a big team of experts to do cutting-edge science. For small countries like Japan, it can be difficult to find experts within the country.

EG: International collaboration isn’t new to most of us, but the way we collaborate in the context of the Interstellar Initiative is very different. Many of us have different professional backgrounds and training, and the concept of collaboration doesn’t have the same meaning for everyone. There are cultures of collaboration that you have to integrate in order to work together, and this is something I may not have experienced if it wasn’t for the Interstellar Initiative. It was a great, eye-opening experience for me.

CM: When you exchange ideas with people from different backgrounds, you never know what could come from the conversation. Sometimes that’s how very interesting scientific ideas come about.

What advice can you offer to young scientists?

CM: Step out of your comfort zone! Don’t be afraid, and don’t hold back when you have opportunities to do things outside of your field or your usual mindset.

EG: There’s always something to learn from people—from peers and mentors, of course, but also from people in earlier stages of their careers. Their perspective might shed light on a different aspect of our own work.

TM: I’d encourage young scientists to apply for the Interstellar Initiative.

Also read: Young Scientists Reach for the Stars

The Organic Chemistry of Milk for Developing Babies

A boy eats a hamburger with a glass of milk.

Organic chemist Steven Townsend of Vanderbilt University explains his research on human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) and their role in developing babies’ microbiome and preventing infection.

Published January 30, 2020

By Marie Gentile and Roger Torda

It is well understood that human milk provides numerous benefits to babies as they develop, particularly in its ability to help protect babies from a variety of infections. But what is the mechanism that is doing the work to help keep babies healthy?

Organic chemist Professor Steven Townsend of Vanderbilt University speaks to us about his research on human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) and their role in developing babies’ microbiome and preventing infection. He also discusses the importance of sharing his science with the general public.

Your work has focused on human milk oligosaccharides. Can you explain what these are and why they are important for an infant’s health?

Oligosaccharide is the scientific term for sugar. Human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) are the complex sugars that are present in human milk, but not in cow’s milk. In human milk, there are about 200 oligosaccharides. By analogy, cow’s milk only contains small quantities of about 30 to 40 oligosaccharides.

HMOs increase the health of the infant in a number of ways. These molecules selectively feed commensal (good bacteria) over bad bacteria. They also protect against bacterial infection by mimicking molecules that pathogenic bacteria use to attach to the gut – the HMOs bind to these pathogens instead and remove them from the system. Recently my group has discovered that these compounds also have intrinsic antimicrobial activity – they actually inhibit the growth of pathogenic bacteria.

Steven D. Townsend, PhD
Assistant Professor of Chemistry
Vanderbilt University

Together, these factors mean that the microbiome of a breastfed infant is selectively engineered to have more commensal species present, outnumbering pathogens and potential pathogens.

How did you become interested in the biology of human milk?

My interest in human milk first struck when my wife and I were walking through Harlem one day. We saw some advertisements for infant formula. In many parts of the world it’s actually illegal to advertise formula, but here in a poor neighborhood in New York City, were formula advertisements. If you go downtown to the East 50s, a more affluent neighborhood, you don’t see any formula advertisements, you see advertisements for breastfeeding. I wanted to know why breastfed babies are typically healthier.

How does human milk differ from formula?

When it comes to milk broadly, the main constituent macromolecule is typically lactose, a sugar (carbohydrate). Most bigger animals also have a lot of protein in their milk, usually one third of the macromolecules, but human milk is different, as only about 6% of the macromolecules are proteins. For human babies and primate babies, it’s more important for our brains to develop faster than our body, which requires more carbohydrates.

Primate milk has a large quantity of complex sugars with a variety of activities – some of the sugars are involved in brain development and some of them are involved in the development of the immune system. Interestingly, we know that for many of these sugars, the baby does not get calories from them, even though they consume grams of them per day. It turns out that the sugars are actually fermented by bacteria in the gut. These sugars are selectively consumed by good bacteria to give them a growth advantage over bad bacteria. Therefore, if they are not present in formula, then formula-fed babies are going to be at a slight health disadvantage.

Are there any other uses for HMOs besides in the development of an infant’s biome?

There are a lot of companies attempting to put HMOs into different food products, for both infants and adults. For example – some companies are trying to develop products for irritable bowel syndrome and other illnesses that are related to a screwed up microbiome.

In my group, we are investigating if HMOs can help antibiotics work more effectively. Many antibiotics have been mis- and over-used and a lot of them are no longer effective. Our research is finding that co-dosing certain antibiotics with human milk sugars results in a synergistic effect – they work together, which means that you can ultimately use less of the antibiotic to kill a bacteria. That’s cool because antibiotics have a lot of negative side effects, but HMOs don’t have side effects.

You often describe yourself as a humanist. How does this inform your scientific research?

When I say I’m a humanist, I mean I care about people’s day-to-day wellbeing.

The humanist part of me is enhanced by communicating the results of our research with the public and getting feedback on different directions that we could pursue. We’re getting a lot of good project ideas from talking to a broad range of people. It’s very important to me that the general public understand the science we’re doing at a fundamental level because they fund it—I think we owe it to them to explain the research we’re doing and get their feedback.

Also read: Nutrition Science is Ensuring a Healthy Sta r t in Life

What Really Happens After Cardiac Arrest?

Published December 06, 2019

By Marie Gentile, Richard Birchard, and Mandy Carr

Speakers from left to right: Sam Parnia, MD, PhD (Director of Critical Care & Resuscitation Research at the NYU School of Medicine), Sarah Perman, MD (University of Colorado School of Medicine), Tom Aufderheide, MD, MS, FACEP, FACC, FAHA (Medical College of Wisconsin), Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD (University of California, Riverside), and Stephan Mayer, MD, FCCM (Wayne State School of Medicine)

We see it in television dramas all the time—a patient in cardiac arrest is rushed into the ER after a severe traumatic injury or medical emergency, with a staff of medical professionals frantically performing CPR. Tension is high and doctors have to figure out how to save the person’s life. Beyond the theatrics of primetime drama, the field of medicine has been making major strides to reverse cardiac arrest and death.

In this video you’ll hear directly from top physicians and researchers who are at the cutting edge of resuscitation science. Moderated by Sam Parnia, this discussion brought together internationally-recognized researcher in emergency cardiac care, Tom Aufderheide; distinguished happiness research psychologist, Sonja Lyubomirsky; world expert in neurological intensive care Stephan Mayer; and Sarah Perman, a leader in resuscitation science and post-cardiac arrest care.

Want to hear more cutting-edge science distilled for the public? Check out the final event in our three-part series, “The Power of Wonder: Modern Marvels in the Age of Science.”

So, You Want to Publish a Scientific Paper?

Learning how to craft a scientific paper so that it is accepted for publication takes practice. An expert provides his perspective.

Published October 1, 2019

By Douglas Braaten, PhD

Learning how to craft a scientific paper so that it is accepted for publication takes practice. It also requires attention to details across many domains. Many advice resources are available, and I encourage any young scientist to carve out time to focus on what to do — and what to avoid — when writing scientific papers.

Before starting to write, give some thought to preparation, process, attitude and goal. Some key points I’ve learned from reading and editing hundreds of papers at Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences and Nature Immunology follow.

These two journals have very different aims, scope and readership, but similar goals of publishing well-written, well-constructed papers for the sake of readers’ understanding and clarity. Note the points below are not presented in order of importance or temporality — all are useful.

Preparation

Part of the preparation is learning as much as possible about scientific publishing in general which will help to make the process both more enjoyable and successful.

The writing of a scientific paper begins when a lot of hard work has been done already. Completion of a series of experiments that demonstrate a statistically relevant discovery is the foundation of all good scientific papers.

That’s not to suggest that one can’t have a reasonably clear picture of what a paper might look like along the way of performing experiments. Indeed, designing experiments — the order and what’s required — is often critically informed by one’s experience in crafting a good scientific paper.

However, it’s never a good idea to start before a complete set of experimental results has been gathered. Doing so can reverse the circle from “now that I have a set of data how best can it be presented?” to “what experiments do I need to do to finish my paper?” the latter being the wrong way around.

Don’t get caught in the trap of needing to do an experiment in order to finish a paper. Instead, set out to perform the complete set of experiments necessary for readers (in particular peer reviewers!) to agree with you that the conclusions are supported by the data. And then write.

Process

Consider who will need to read your paper before it is accepted for publication.

Among the best papers I’ve read are those that have been prepared for a particular journal and its readership. Writing to achieve those goals may not seem as important as simply describing the data. It’s critical, however, to write for readers and to prepare a paper with specific audiences in mind. These two points are often ignored. The journal editors must find it suitable for their journal, believe a given paper presents good data, and does so clearly enough to send it out for peer review. Next, while the process of peer review can vary among journals, papers at most journals are sent to at least two external peer reviewers. These individuals — very busy scientists, often pressed for time and overloaded with work — volunteer their time to comment on papers.

More than anything, peer reviewers hate papers that are overly long, vague and not crafted for readers. By accepting to review a paper, reviewers by and large give benefit to any doubt that it presents interesting information and data. Give them what they want without distractions.

Reviewers and editors are busy individuals — don’t hobble yourself by ignoring the fact that they can be easily put off by sloppy and careless writing.

Attitude

Some of the above considerations of process are also considerations of attitude. It’s critical for authors to set and maintain a level of respect and collegiality for everyone involved when preparing and submitting a scientific paper — from submission, to peer review, production and every step through publication.

In my experience, the most successful authors are those whose attitude reflects the ideals of both achievement of work and an earnest, genuine desire to share important new information with the scientific community.

In contrast to that, an attitude of entitlement to be published is immediately noticeable to editors and, especially, to peer reviewers. I have seen good papers that may have only needed minor improvements as recommended by reviewers, upended by rejection because the authors believed they were in the right and didn’t need to make changes.

Even the most experienced scientists know it’s their responsibility to maintain an open, respectful attitude during the publishing process. Ignoring this imperils your aims for little more than an overly needy ego. Consider it a privilege to have your scientific paper evaluated and published.

Goal

Much of the above could have been included in a discussion of scientific author goals. The right preparation, a well-considered process, and a collegial and respectful attitude are certainly worthy goals.

Less obvious, yet equally important is considering the audience from the perspective of readers who want Open Access (OA). The interest in scientific papers to be OA is now so intense that it’s important for authors to consider OA for every one of their papers.

Indeed, so many funders are pushing for not only OA, but for other forms of pre- and post-publication access to scientific data that it behooves every author to consider both the laudable goals of OA and the ramifications for scientific publishing. Fortunately, many online forums present extensive discussions — e.g. oaspa.org.

As the OA movement grows — and there’s no doubt that it will — authors must consider whether they will submit only to OA journals to support the goal of open information. At the same time, they should consider that publishers of OA journals will feel increasing pressure to seek more and more submissions to cover their publication costs as subscription revenue declines. Authors will surely experience this increasing pressure, as it will undoubtedly affect the publishing process.

For example, more papers to evaluate increases the burdens on everyone involved — editors, reviewers, production staff. Ensuring you do all that you can as a responsible scientific author will likely help achieve your personal aims of publishing and of contributing openly to scientific progress. And while much more can be said about how to publish successfully, keeping in mind preparation, process, attitude and your goal should help.

The Challenge of Keeping Women in STEM

A woman conducts research in a science lab.

Efforts to close the gender gap in STEM by encouraging girls to study science have resulted in more young women considering careers in science. Yet systemic biases in academia create an uncertain future.

Published October 1, 2019

By Sonya Dougal, PhD

Many women who earn PhDs in life sciences choose to pursue non-academic careers during the critical period between receiving their doctoral degree and becoming an independent investigator. This gender specific phenomenon, described as a “leaky pipeline,” is a significant source of brain drain for academic and biomedical research.

Anne L. Taylor, MD, Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons

A Biased Culture

Overt bias against women in the sciences is less common today than in decades past, but implicit bias remains a major challenge for male and female scientists alike.

According to Virginia Valian, distinguished professor at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center and director of the Hunter College Gender Equity Project, bias, whether conscious or not, shapes attitudes and behavior.

“The traits that are perceived to be better for science are those we often ascribe to men, such as independence and a focus on the task at hand, while women are nurturant, communal and express their feelings,” Valian said. “These gender schemas can impact reality, such that women’s achievements are systematically slightly under-acknowledged and men’s are slightly over-acknowledged.”

The Impact of Implicit Bias on Hiring Decisions

A slew of research studies examining the impact of implicit bias on hiring decisions and career advancement, conference presentations, manuscript authorship and grant funding, confirm Valian’s assertion. For example, in a 2012 study from Yale University, 100 male and female faculty members at top research institutions reviewed an identical resume for a hypothetical lab position with one change — the applicant was either a man or a woman. The resume bearing a man’s name was favored over the same resume with a woman’s name. Male candidates were perceived as more competent and offered higher salaries, while female candidates were rated as more likeable.

Navigating the transition from graduate school or postdoctoral researcher to independent investigator hinges largely on funding, and this too is an area rife with inequalities. While women receive grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) at about the same rate as their male peers, first-time female PIs are funded at comparatively lower levels.

A further consequence of implicit bias is that female professors do more of the service work within departments — taking on additional teaching responsibilities and serving on committees. While this work is essential, it does not support the attainment of federal and foundation grant funding needed to advance to academic leadership positions, nor is it valued during tenure review.

Not Just Women’s Work

The difficulties of juggling career and family demands have especially stark repercussions in the scientific workforce. A surprising 43 percent of women scientists — and nearly 25 percent of men — transition to part-time employment or leave their careers altogether after having their first child, according to Cech & Blair-Loy’s 2019 study of the impact of parenthood on STEM careers. In response, some institutions have implemented policies to address retention of both women and men.

“Having children should not be a permanent impediment to advancement,” said Ann Taylor, MD, vice dean of academic affairs at the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. “Yet when women lessen their workload to accommodate their family responsibilities, we don’t do a good job putting them back on the path to leadership.”

Taylor believes that gender-neutral policies at Columbia, such as 13 weeks of paid leave for primary caregivers and an extra year on the tenure clock for each child, “really help support careers,” but acknowledges that some difficulties are harder to address. Grant funds often come with strict timelines, posing challenges for women and men who temporarily trim their work responsibilities during the early years of family life.

“You don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘I’m going to take this three-year grant and make it a six-year grant,’” Taylor said. “These are problems we have to solve, and we are actively thinking about how to do that.”

Creating the systemic, institutional change that Taylor and others envision requires support from male STEM professionals as well. Neuroscientist Paul Greengard — who was Vincent Astor Professor at The Rockefeller University until his death last year — was an early advocate for gender equality in academia.

“There’s absolutely no evidence one way or another as to whether there’s a difference between the sexes in terms of creativity, the most important parameter of scientific discovery,” Greengard said in an interview with The Rockefeller University in 2016.

Establishing a Preeminent Annual Prize for Women in STEM

When he won the Nobel Prize in 2000, Greengard donated his share of the honorarium to establish the preeminent annual prize for women in science — The Pearl Meister Greengard Prize. Named for Dr. Greengard’s mother, the prize sparked a robust program of advocacy and fundraising to support women scientists at Rockefeller. Aaron Mertz, director of the Aspen Institute Science & Society Program and a former postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller, served as the vice president of the professional development group WISeR (Women in Science at Rockefeller).

“Men must be active contributors to discussions about gender equality, and have a significant role in creating a scientific environment in which women can flourish,” he said. “I firmly believe that women’s issues are men’s issues.”

Without men at the table, institutional change will not happen.

The New York Academy of Sciences is committed to a diverse balance of program speakers.

If You Can’t See It, You Can’t Be It

A culture of mentoring is vital in business — including guidance on salary negotiation, self-promotion and other skills necessary to advance in competitive fields — yet this type of support is a relative newcomer to academia. For early and mid-career women scientists, direction from senior colleagues can mean the difference between choosing an alternative career path and advancing to leadership positions.

Critically, Taylor highlighted that “the nature of mentorship can vary. Women are more likely to have mentorship that involves psychosocial support and are not provided with tactical career development strategies.” Columbia recently augmented their leadership and management programs to address the needs of women and diverse faculty by making both types of mentoring available for all faculty members, along with initiatives to ensure salary parity and timely promotions.

Men have so outnumbered women in scientific conference programs that a new word — manels — to describe all-male panels has entered the scientific lexicon. Feminist and activist Marie Wilson popularized the notion “if you can’t see it, you can’t be it” to encourage women’s leadership as role models.

To raise the visibility of women scientists, the New York Academy of Sciences requires gender parity among conference speakers. Forty-five percent of the speakers in the Academy’s 2018-2019 programming cycle were women, with an organizational goal of reaching 50 percent in the coming year.

Recently, NIH director Francis Collins released a statement indicating that he would decline participation at scientific conferences where “inclusiveness was not evident in the agenda,” writing that these parameters should include women and underrepresented groups. Conference organizers striving to meet that mandate may turn to Request a Woman Scientist, a database created by the 500 Women Scientists initiative — an organization galvanizing public support for STEM diversity and equality. In less than one year, more than 9,000 women scientists from 133 countries have added their profiles.

The Challenge Ahead

A 2018 paper by Lerchenmueller & Sorenson of the Yale School of Management noted that, “Rather than women dripping out of the STEM career pipe every centimeter along the way, they appear to pour out at one of the critical junctures.” This metaphor suggests that the first step to gender equality is raising awareness of the pressure points in women scientists’ careers such as the transition between trainee and independent investigator.

The path forward will require collective action between universities, government agencies and funders to remove systemic barriers and biases. Momentum is building for those willing to make the effort. As Taylor emphasized, “Equity and justice is work every single day.”

Non-STEM Skills Give an Edge to STEM Professionals

A woman video records herself giving a presentation.

Today’s employers want workers who have “soft skills,” such as being a good listener or thinking critically.

Published October 1, 2019

By Pinelopi Kyriazi

Joseph Borrello, Sinai Bio-Design, Ichan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

According to a new report from Cengage, an educational technology and services company, employers want college graduates who have “soft skills,” such as being a good listener or thinking critically, but they have difficulty finding such candidates.

Such so-called “soft” skills are highly sought after by employers, yet they tend to be given short shrift in academic settings. As a result, while science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) professionals receive extensive training on technical skills, their non-STEM skills tend to be underdeveloped.

Nevertheless, a growing body of evidence shows that soft skills are an indicator for future employment and earnings compared to technical and manual skills. Hence, a gap has been created between which skills employers are looking for, and which skills STEM job candidates provide. From running a productive lab to leading a research team, a successful career for scientists hinges on their ability to communicate and collaborate, often with teams that may be in other departments, other institutions or even other countries.

Developing Skills in Persuasive Writing, Management

Take grant writing. Competition for a shrinking pool of funding is fierce, so academic scientists need to tell a cohesive and evidence-based story from complicated data to grab the attention of reviewers and secure funding.

Translating complex content in a simple and easy to understand manner is not a skill frequently practiced until scientists earn their first academic job. By this point, stress is high as job security often rests on their ability to earn grants to continue their research.

Similarly, managing a team of graduate students or post-doctoral trainees is a daunting task for a new professor. On top of all that, many have a heavy teaching load, making their time and project management skills essential to their productivity.

Technical Skills: The Great Decline

A recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute, explored the shifting demand for workforce skills from now until 2030. They found that technological advancements, including automation and artificial intelligence, are changing the types of tasks employees are performing.

As people increasingly interact with machines, there is a greater need for technological skills, social and emotional skills and higher cognitive skills. These include creativity, complex information processing, empathy, critical thinking and communication. People are still outperforming machines on such skills, but machines are generally much better at repetitive tasks with explicit rules requiring physical or manual labor.

The Impact of Automation

Historically, technological advancement has created new types of work while some occupations become outdated. According to the McKinsey report, while the internet eliminated many jobs, new positions emerged in computer programming, application development, social media marketing and search engine optimization.

Science is undergoing a similar pattern, with mundane tasks such as repetitive data collection and replication becoming more dependent on automation. Scientists are improving their technological skills such as coding complex algorithmic models, interpreting multi-dimensional data and managing big data sets.

Social skills are also becoming more prevalent as teamwork and communication required for intricate experiments is growing. Lab sizes are increasing and scientists at various training levels — from undergraduate students to early career researchers — must work together to complete large scale projects.

Scientists in Academia and Industry Possess Many Non-STEM Skills

Graduate training for scientists is heavily focused on acquiring technical skills and scientific acumen. But a vital aspect of scientific research is sharing the knowledge acquired through experimentation in a meaningful and comprehensible manner. Hence communication of scientific data becomes the cornerstone of research.

Joseph Borrello, a PhD candidate and Prototyping Fellow at Sinai Bio-Design at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, highlights the need to attend scientific conferences and share his work.

“Part of communication is going to places where you can communicate,” he says, “and knowing that you have something to share even if it is not completed into a polished publication or presentation.”

Conferences are a great way to interact with other scientists, but also attending events for a broader audience can make you a better communicator.

“It is hard to condense everything down into an elevator pitch format,” says Borrello. But he emphasizes that “doing it once is not necessarily enough.” Building up to a confident elevator pitch takes practice and repetition, just like a good science experiment.

Skills in Effective Communication

Communication doesn’t only include oral presentations. Scientists must master communicating science through writing as well.

Nida Rehmani, who completed her PhD in Biochemistry and M.Ed. in STEM, worked on her writing skills after graduate school as a content/blog editor at Lotus STEMM, a non-profit organization for South Asian women in STEMM (the second M stands for medicine).

“Activities like writing scientific blogs is a great way to develop one of the soft skills and should be inculcated in the next STEM generation,” she says.

Academics are not the only scientists who need excellent communication skills. Those in industry require both scientific and business acumen to get ahead. Savitri Sharma, a biochemist leading the Apparel Research division of Nike Sport Research Lab, emphasizes that scientists need to develop their story-telling skills; especially when sharing results with team members of different backgrounds.

“Bottom line up front,” she says, “being able to connect your work straight to what is happening at the company will set you apart.”

It’s important to grab the audience’s attention and communicate why someone should care. Additionally, she underscores that what sets scientists apart in business, is that they can dive into the details when needed.

“Don’t shy away from being the expert that you are, don’t feel embarrassed or ashamed, be proud,” she says.

The Power of Networking

Another important non-STEM skill is networking. Regularly attending both external and internal conferences, receptions and symposia can help scientists improve their research by making new connections leading to collaborations. As Borrello explains, networking is a stochastic process and can feel awkward at first.

“All the rules of chemistry and chemical reactions that apply to solutions, apply to people also,” he says. “Sometimes the randomness in networking can enable positive relationships to develop. The only way to meet a new collaborator or connect with a potential employer is by attending many networking opportunities and speaking up.”

In industry, networking plays an important role in advancing your career. Sharma leveraged this skill to land her current role as a researcher at Nike. Further she emphasized this as one of the essential skills for her mentees during her tenure as Chair of Women of STEM network at Nike.

After working in various business functions, she declared her intent to pursue a career in research and development at one of the events. As a result of a connection she made, one of the other attendees helped her apply for the position. Navigating large organizations is difficult, but effective networking skills can ameliorate the stress and propel your scientific career forward.

Other “Soft” Skills

Other soft skills include time and project management, team work, listening and social skills. Many of these are often underestimated, but they are all important elements in today’s work environment and can give you an edge to land the job of your dreams.

“Understanding your own potential and skills is important in time management,” says Rehmani.

Knowing and articulating your value can make a difference in the productivity of a lab or a team setting. Scientists already possess many of these skills — continually refining and practicing them will help researchers to become more valued employees, and, as a result, advance their careers.

Automation and Artificial Intelligence Will Accelerate the Shift in Skills that the Workforce Needs

Projections of the future workforce into 2030 indicate that the number of work hours spent on soft skills and technological skills will rise, while hours on physical, manual and basic cognitive skills will drop.
*Source: McKinsey Global Institute Workforce Skills Model; McKinsey Global Institute analysis*

Also read: So, You Want to Publish a Scientific Paper?

How Can Humans Compete with Artificial Intelligence?

A graphic illustration of a human brain, meant to represent artificial intelligence.

The Intelligence Revolution raises fundamental questions about what it means to be human.

Published October 1, 2019

By Jerry Hultin

Machine learning. Advanced manufacturing. Autonomous vehicles. Robotics. Drones. Welcome to the rise of smart machines! This revolution — let’s call it the Intelligence Revolution — offers the world benefit and harm at a scale exceeding that of the three earlier Industrial Revolutions. But it also raises fundamental questions about what it means to be human.

Will science and technology of the 21st century make us irrelevant? Will this lead to massive social unrest when smart machines take worker’s jobs? More fundamentally, how will a world operate where everyone may have the luxury of leisure, but not the economic resources to enjoy it?

In 2017, I chaired a study into the impact of artificial intelligence and automation on the Pentagon’s “business processes.” Based on what corporations in America have already achieved, we estimated that the U.S. Department of Defense could save nearly $60 billion a year by using the existing tools of automation and artificial intelligence.

The Growing Role of Automation in the Workplace

In addition, the quality and speed of decision-making in the Pentagon would be quantitatively better. Conversely we cautioned that the job losses and the redistribution of work functions would be huge. Thus the Pentagon would face a major challenge in finding jobs and providing training for the thousands of displaced employees.

According to a recent McKinsey Global Institute report on the growing role of automation in the workplace, at least 30 percent of the predominantly repetitive, routine and physical activities in 60 percent of current jobs can be automated. With efficiency gains and cost reduction of such magnitude the commercial, industrial, healthcare and construction industries will see AI and the automation that springs from AI, as compelling.

So how will the accelerating application of AI play out around the world? Here in the United States, the people most at risk include 14.7 million young workers, 11.5 million workers over age 50 and 11.9 million Hispanic and African-American workers. This accounts for more than 20 percent of the full-time employees in the United States. Amazon, which attributes the success of its one-day shipping to AI, is now committing some $700 million to retrain or up-skill its workers for the increasing technical demands of new jobs that will help them stay ahead of displacement by AI.

Automation Implications in India, Africa

But what about a country like India? With a population over 1.3 billion, nearly 750 million young people under the age of thirty, and an overall literacy rate of 71 percent, India is striving to radically increase jobs and reduce its level of poverty. But India may not get this chance if automated technologies supplant available jobs.

Much the same can be said about the future fate of Africa as its population of approximately 1 billion people grows to 2 billion by 2050. If Africa only has access to the educational and economic tools available today, the likelihood that it can match the growth rates of China and other Asian nations is remote.

The challenges presented by AI require a fundamental reworking of key components of how we learn and live. A recent Atlantic Monthly “conversation” between Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Dan Huttenlocher about the future of AI concluded with the following:

The three of us differ in the extent to which we are optimists about AI. But we agree that it is changing human knowledge, perception, and reality — and, in so doing, changing the course of human history. We seek to understand it and its consequences, and encourage others across disciplines to do the same.

Looking Ahead

Fortunately, the Academy under Ellis Rubinstein’s leadership has taken seriously the importance of increasing scientific and technological skills among young people around the world. Propelled by his concerns about their future prosperity and security, Ellis enlisted the business community, NGOs and philanthropists, in an unprecedented series of cooperative programs designed to increase skills. Through the collective action of our partners, benefactors and Members, we can lead a global conversation to better understand, develop and employ the power of AI.

Help Wanted to Close the Skills Gap

A researcher examines a test tube inside a science lab.

The fastest growing occupations over the next decade will be in the energy, health and education sectors.

Published October 1, 2019

By Joan Lebow

Fabio Manca, Head of the Skills Analysis team at the OECD Centre for Skills

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the fastest growing occupations over the next decade will be in the energy, health and education sectors, while the medical and technical sectors will contain the highest paying occupations. All these occupations will require a STEM education.

STEM learning is often cited by the public and private sectors as the way to prepare for a technology-driven future. A recently published study by Randstad USA, an employment/recruitment agency, found that 68 percent of U.S. workers surveyed would focus on studying science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, if they could restart their educational journeys at age 18.

Spending for STEM education has grown substantially at all levels of schooling, largely due to the investment of billions of public and private sector dollars. This trajectory continues even with the persistent challenge of keeping young people, especially girls, engaged in STEM learning in their elementary years throughout higher education.

Filling the “Skills Gap” in STEM Careers

On the surface, an emphasis on STEM would seem to be all that’s needed to prepare the next generation workforce. But with projections for employment in STEM related occupations expected to grow to more than nine million jobs by 2022 and the steady drumbeat of corporate leaders saying they cannot find qualified workers for millions of open positions, the issues surrounding the so-called “skills gap” are not quite that straightforward.

“To thrive in a digital world, workers will need not only digital skills, but a broad mix of skills including strong cognitive and socio-emotional skills. High level information communication technology skills will also be increasingly important in growing occupations linked to new technologies,” says Fabio Manca, Head of the Skills Analysis team at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Centre for Skills.

The OECD is an international forum and knowledge hub for data and analysis, best-practice sharing, and advice on public policies and global standard-setting. “[Workers] will also need complementary skills, ranging from good literacy and numeracy to the socio-emotional skills required to work collaboratively and flexibly,” says Manca.

Also Developing Soft Skills

Peter Robinson, President and CEO, United States Council for International Business (USCIB)

Analysts agree that more training and more types of abilities are needed now and in the future for workers to fill those jobs. Along with STEM knowledge, it’s traits like “flexibility” and “adaptability” that analysts repeatedly mention as signposts to success.

“It’s not just the hard skills, but critical thinking and soft skills that will be valued,” says Peter Robinson, president and CEO of the United States Council for International Business (USCIB), a policy advocacy and trade services organization dedicated to promoting open markets and representing American business interests internationally.

Technological advances mean work itself will keep evolving. Robinson and others call for more public-private partnerships among business, education and government to help the labor force prepare for, and respond to change. Without this shared burden they see a skills gap that will only widen.

“You won’t be able to front load your education. You will have to be adaptable to change down the road in your career,” says Robinson.

It Starts with Education

Any one-dimensional academic or on-the-job background, could pose challenges. As the OECD’s 2019 Report on Skills points out, “Initial education systems have a key role to play in providing young people with the skills required for a successful entry into the labor market. However, deep and rapid changes in technology make it difficult for initial education to equip young people with the knowledge and capabilities they will need throughout their work life.”

Says the OECD’s Manca, “Recent research by the OECD also highlights that labor market shortages are widespread in high-skilled occupations that make an intense use of communication and verbal abilities, these latter influencing the acquisition and application of information in problem solving contexts.”

An ability to collaborate, problem solve, think creatively and be malleable enough for a future of life-long learning are essential, experts agree. A paradox is emerging. Such skills are often best learned on the job, and not having them is an impediment to hiring, the USCIB’s Robinson explains. He says companies will need to partner with the education system much earlier. “They can’t just show up on graduation day.”

New approaches to curriculum, modern versions of industrial apprenticeships, and efforts to re-skill existing employees and returning mid-career employees through “returnships” are among the ways to accomplish these expanded training needs. “Employers who want the right work force will also need to invest in training workers,” says Robinson. “But it will not be just about training in computers or robotics. Entire industries may change in ways we don’t foresee.”

Sangheon Lee, Director of the Employment Policy Department of the International Labour Organization (ILO)

Filling the “Investment Gap”

“We have an investment gap,” says Sangheon Lee, Director of the Employment Policy Department of the International Labor Organization (ILO). The ILO seeks to promote full and productive employment by developing integrated employment, development and skills policies. Lee also views reinvigorated job training initiatives as essential to creating a productive workforce.

“The most important thing is to reduce the gap between the rhetoric and investment” Lee says. “In over 20 countries, people are learning more and doing more in STEM. But what they are learning is theoretical and needs to be more reality-based. You need to come out of your education with some reasonable set of skills, and the job would train you further.”

Lee and other labor policy analysts concur, a forward-thinking combination of government, education and industry must support this focus on training and especially life-long learning. For now, employers are poaching skilled workers from other companies.

“They are hesitant to spend money on training for transferable skills, the very skills that are often important to success. Instead, employers typically want to invest only in training related to a specific job, keeping their investments targeted to their bottom line,“ says Lee.

This is especially true in the tech sector where innovative businesses are small and agile, but don’t have the money for significant training programs, Lee notes.

Tax Incentives for Job Training

Neither students nor individuals seeing their jobs morph mid-career can afford to pay for additional training without help. Public incentives will be necessary, from apprenticeships to late-career pivots. According to Lee, new accounting structures, tax incentives for job training, and more up-front government investment will be important tools bridging the skills gap as work changes.

Another critical issue to address that will ultimately narrow the skills gap, Lee says, is gender bias. More attention is needed to improve workplace policies and attitudes towards qualified women in the labor force. STEM skills may land a woman a job, he points out, but attitudes and stereotypes are a persistent barrier to their success especially in STEM professions.

“There is still a lot of implicit discrimination. It’s not just about the ability to do the job,” Lee says.

Labor policy analysts say it’s an over-simplification to divide jobs of the future into tech and non-tech roles; the future of work will be far more nuanced than what works for the STEM haves and have nots. To prepare for what’s ahead and be able to address changes when the time comes, as well as to find a workforce with the necessary skills, will take a longer, collaborative view from many societal sectors.

“There needs to be a paradigm shift, from employment to employability, says Robinson from USCIB.

Grant Rejection Could Be the Best Thing for Your Career

Four different sciences and engineers share their experiences of transitioning from academia into research-focused private sector positions.

Published October 1, 2019

By Ann Delfaro

As a doctoral student, microbiologist Natasha Frank was known for challenging assumptions. Her scientific skepticism and technical skills steered more than one experiment to safety when it threatened to tank, and classmates routinely approached her for advice.

Few were surprised, then, when Frank accepted a postdoctoral position at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and started down the path of a traditional academic career. Later, as a research scientist at Washington State University, she divided her days between teaching, bench work and grant applications.

It’s not that Frank particularly wanted to become a professor — that’s simply the path graduate students are steered down, she says.

“I’d heard of a few alternate careers in science but they seemed out of reach,” says Frank. “I always thought, how do you get into those things?”

She eventually accepted a microbiologist position at Clorox, reasoning that industry was basically science with added job stability.

But that wasn’t quite true, as she discovered when her department was dissolved. While scanning LinkedIn for new opportunities, she noticed that she met all the qualifications for a position unlike any other on her CV.

She landed the job. Now she works as a patent agent for a large molecular diagnostics company, using her science training to gauge whether new products or services might infringe on existing patents.

“I went from thinking alternative careers were out of reach to having one,” she says.

If Frank’s story seems familiar, that’s because it is. More and more students are graduating from PhD programs — a 41 percent increase between 2003 and 2013 — but ultimately, only 26 percent move into tenured or tenure-track positions in the United States. Others migrate to jobs in business, government or industry.

And still others leave science entirely. Sort of.

Define ‘Anomaly’

Joseph Brown, a senior data scientist, holds a PhD in biomedical sciences and was working for Thermo Fisher Scientific — writing software to analyze peptide behavior in different conditions — when a friend mentioned the strong culture and benefits at nearby Netflix.

On a whim, Brown went online and scanned the company’s job listings. He noticed one for a data scientist to do anomaly detection; that is, to pinpoint a small number of problematic servers among the company’s hundreds of thousands of servers.

“And I thought, you know — it’s kind of similar to my past work, identifying individual peptides or genes that are behaving unusually in a huge swath of the proteome or transcriptome,” Brown says.

Video streaming might seem a far reach from molecular biology, but for Brown the shift was a natural progression of his lifelong interests in statistics and computer programming.

“The math is what really tied everything together,” he says.

Now he works alongside other scientists, most holding doctorates in physics, economics, mathematics or computer science. While few have a life sciences background, it isn’t unheard of, according to Brown.

Rebranding the PhD

David Cox
MIT-IBM Watson Artificial Intelligence Lab

As it turns out, math isn’t the most critical common denominator. According to David Cox, director of the MIT-IBM Watson Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab at the Cambridge Research Center.

“A lot of it is training you how to think, how to solve problems, how to be resilient,” Cox says

During his years as a Harvard professor of engineering, computer science, and molecular and cell biology, Cox saw many PhD graduates apply their critical thinking skills to successful careers in consulting. In particular, he says, the routine practice of “analyzing data” is now called “data science” — and it’s in high demand.

“Scientists have been doing that for a long time and didn’t think anything of it, but industry has woken up to the idea that this is an interesting thing to do with business data,” Cox says. “If you know how to wrangle data, run statistically valid and rigorous tests to understand it, that’s a marketable and valuable skill.”

It’s obvious how computer science graduates might leverage that skill, but scientists in fields such as neurology can bank on that, too. The combination of data analysis and specialized knowledge — for example, how the brain and intelligence work — is especially transferable.

“Those skills are often transferable to thinking about AI and structuring experiments to understand what is happening in an artificial system,” Cox says.

Emphasizing Marketable Skills

Sometimes PhDs need help rebranding themselves to emphasize these marketable skills. That’s where physicist Alejandro de la Puente comes in.

“Nowadays, there are fewer options in academia and more options elsewhere,” says de la Puente, who completed a postdoc in physics and now offers career and professional development for STEM graduates at the New York Academy of Sciences.

The pressures that discourage recent STEM graduates from entering academia are cyclical, de la Puente notes. Few tenure positions exist because scientists who land those positions tend to stay a long time and retire late in life. At the same time, university enrollment is up. To deal with the demand, institutions are hiring more adjuncts or non-tenure track professors than in years past.

“When you join as an adjunct, most of your responsibility is teaching,” de la Puente explains. “So it’s a circular thing: You want to stay in academia, but most positions are not tenure track. And if you’re not tenure track, you’re doing more teaching and less research. That limits your chances of getting grants and gives you no chance at tenure.”

Through the Academy’s Science Alliance Initiative, de la Puente teaches scientists how to transfer their skills to nonacademic jobs, how to broaden their reach — and most importantly, how to communicate the technicalities of their work to a broader audience, including job recruiters. The program fills an unmet need for graduate students like Frank, who may hear about alternate careers but have no idea how to pursue one.

Counter Culture

How does one land quite so far from the lab, though?

Chacko Sonny, executive producer and vice president at Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind the game Overwatch, knew he wanted to be an engineer years before enrolling in Stanford’s undergraduate and master’s electrical engineering programs. But what he didn’t count on was eventually applying that training to the video game industry.

Strategic by nature, Sonny was working as a consultant for the international strategy firm McKinsey & Company when he realized he craved a change of pace. Specifically, he wanted to use his training in electrical engineering and economics to build and market things, and he wanted those things to be fun and creative. He saw two options: the visual effects industry or the video game industry.

Sonny began applying to every game company he could think of, finally landing an interview with Los Angeles-based Activision. He noticed a “massive” culture divide between the engineering and video game industries.

A Heterogeneous Blend Of Talent

Whereas both his McKinsey and video game colleagues were exceptionally smart, his game industry colleagues were talented across more different dimensions that is typically found in consulting companies. Teams of 200 people, consisting of a third each of artists, designers and engineers, collaborated on projects that demanded a heterogeneous blend of talent.

For one thing, debugging problems becomes a massive ordeal for video games built on millions of lines of code.

“If a character behaves oddly on screen or doesn’t display an expected behavior, you need a structured problem-solving approach to figure out why,” he says.

Games can take hundreds of hours to play to completion, so Sonny used his engineering mindset to hone in on small yet critical errors in the code. The consistent challenge and excitement of the game industry propelled him forward, and before long he’d made a career of it.

Forward Momentum

Like Sonny, Frank has gained valuable, diverse skills since leaving the traditional academic route.

“I get exposed to business development and even finance, regulatory, marketing, communications,” she says.

She’s learned how to calculate prospective revenue and determine if the company can afford a certain license. These challenges keep her engaged, but she hasn’t ruled out a future career shift.

“This experience has created opportunities to do different things, should I decide later on that I might take a different turn.”

Also read: So, You Want to Publish a Scientific Paper? and Legendary Labs: Secrets for Scientific Excellence.

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