Heavy teaching loads, constant grant applications, and pressure from funders can mark the career paths of scientists who move between academia and industry. So said three researchers who spoke at MIT’s Stata Center on Thursday as part of a summer career development series.

The panel -"Academia, Industry, or Both? "– was aimed at students trying to decide between the two settings. Panelists included – Dr. Dane Boysen, Postdoctoral Associate, Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering, Dr. Livia Racz, Division Leader of Advanced Hardware Development at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory and Dr. Lloyd Klickstein, Translational Medicine Head of the New Indication Discovery Unit at Novartis.

Boysen began with the tale of how his fuel cell breakthrough became an all consuming, unsuccessful start up. Now he’s doing research at MIT and happy to be in academia. But, he’s noted that academic opportunities may be much more limited than many young scientists are led to believe.

Many, he said, are familiar with the 2007 National Academy of Sciences report (.pdf) “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” which looks to science and technology to fuel the nation’s economy. But Boysen said pointed to a recent piece in the Miller-McClune magazine called “The Real Science Gap,” which argues that job opportunities are limited for new academic scientists.

From “The Real Science Gap”:

“There is no scientist shortage,” declares Harvard economics professor Richard Freeman, a pre-eminent authority on the scientific work force. Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a leading demographer who is also a national authority on science training, cites the “profound irony” of crying shortage — as have many business leaders, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates — while scores of thousands of young Ph.D.s labor in the nation’s university labs as low-paid, temporary workers, ostensibly training for permanent faculty positions that will never exist.

Back when today’s senior-most professors were young, Ph.D.s routinely became tenure-track assistant professors, complete with labs of their own, in their late 20s. But today, in many fields, faculty openings routinely draw hundreds of qualified applicants. The tiny fraction who do manage to land their first faculty post are generally in their late 30s or early 40s by the time they get their research careers under way. Today’s large surplus of scientists began in the life sciences but is now apparent in fields as diverse as astronomy, meteorology and high-energy physics.

Racz and Klickstein were a little more optimistic about the job prospects in their settings. Racz said Draper Labs offers a mix of academic and commercial work and she’s about to hire 30 people. Both Racz and Klickstein said they look for more than scientific achievement in new employees. They want employees adept at writing, making presentations and managing others.

Racz was sure she wanted to work in academia, but after a teaching stint, ended up working at two start ups before landing at Draper.

“After a lot of twists and turns, none of which I planned, I ended up in a really wonderful place,” she said.

Klickstein — a physician scientists who moved from Harvard to Novartis —suggested that new scientists should think about where they want to end up, and work toward getting there.

“The journey has to be part of the destination,” he said.