Contributor Ewen Callaway, reporter at Nature

Illustration by Señor Salme

Where do scientists go after they leave the lab? I profiled three exceptional ex-scientists in a feature for Nature, “The ones who got away,” and I heard from many more who participated in #LifeAfterTheLab on Twitter and Facebook. Keep them coming!

My goals with “The ones who got away” were to find out why very talented scientists left the lab, where they ended up, and how their scientific training guided their path (for more on that see our accompanying editorial: There is life after academia). For editorial reasons, we focused on three people who had drifted far from science. But sources such as the NSF Survey of Doctorate Recipients and my own intuition and experience suggest that a lot of PhDs have left academia, but not science.

While researching the story, I heard from lots of group leaders about star graduate students who are now working at biotechs, science-related NGOs or, like Jasveen Chugh, at a science-based consultancy. Here’s her story.

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A decade after completing her PhD, Jasveen Chugh still looks to her former mentor for advice. But the best she ever got from Bonnie Wallace, a protein crystallographer at Birkbeck College, University of London, was to leave. “Bonnie called me into my office and said ‘I know you want more and I’d encourage you to think about what might suit you better’,” recalls Chugh, now a life sciences and health care consultant at a London-based firm called PA Consulting. Continue reading →