I love my new job title. It intrigues people and always stimulates conversation. How do you become an SWIR? What do you do? Well, it's a long story of a gradual transition from research scientist to full-time writer, but if you bear with me, I'll try to explain how it all evolved. I guess I'm a chemist more by genetic determinism than by choice (more scientists in the family than I can count on m...
By the age of 40, Cathy Prescott (see picture at left) had done postdocs in three different countries, had moved from academia to industry and back again, and had started her own company. Now director of science at venture capital firm Avlar Bioventures Ltd. in Cambridge, U.K., Prescott says that at every stage she learned new things that would come in handy later on. As a geneticist armed with a...
Currently vice president of business development at Axaron Bioscience AG, Heidelberg, Alrik Koppenhöfer (pictured at left) has moved fast in a very dynamic field to establish himself in senior management just 4 years after completing his PhD. But it hasn't all been plain sailing. Koppenhöfer studied chemistry in his native Germany, obtaining his degree from the University of Freiburg. For his fin...
It was nearly 6 years ago when I made the fateful decision to "leave the bench" and become a medical writer and entrepreneur. The decision didn?t come easily, but now I?m my own boss and I have a successful business in a niche market: My company provides a unique combination of medical writing and conference planning services for the medical and health sectors. Building the business has been a hu...
Mathematical ecology has been a formally recognized academic subdiscipline at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UT), since 1977. The program was developed as an interdisciplinary collaboration of the mathematics department and the graduate program in ecology at UT, with close connections to the environmental sciences division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Oak Ridge environmental cons...
