From academia to medical writing, editing, policy, further research and a swap from communications to a PhD in later life.

In 2015, Naturejobs is celebrating mobility in science, where researchers are changing labs, moving countries or transitioning into something completely different. In January 2014, all of these things hapenned. Below, we’ve selected just a handful of job changes to give you a flavour of the variety of things you can do with a science degree.

Viviane Callier

Viviane Callier was a postdoctoral fellow from 2011-2013. In late 2013, she transitioned to a technical writing position for a consulting company in the Washington DC area. In her new role as a Scientific Communications Editor at the National Cancer Institute, which she started in January 2015, her main challenges are the more frequent and stricter deadlines. But during the transition, it was the leap into the unknown, leaving friends behind and feeling like “I had to start all over from scratch,” that were the three biggest challenges.

Lucy Craggs

Lucy Craggs held a postdoctoral research at the University of Newcastle, where she was working in the field of neuroscience. The decision to leave academia was difficult, but difficult supervisory relationships, feeling undervalued and realising that if she wanted to stay in academia she would need to relocate, meant that it was the right thing to do. In January 2015 she started working as a medical writer for MediTech Media, part of the Nucleus Group of companies, focussing on the communication of the drug discovery process.
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