Practices might differ from country to country, but undergraduate students can be better served in research, says Shaun Khoo. One of the things that excited me about taking up a Canadian postdoctoral position was that, for the first time, I would get a chance to work with and mentor enthusiastic undergraduate researchers. I looked forward to the chance to gain mentorship skills while helping out future scientists, and maybe, eventually, freeing up some of my own time. As an Australian, I had never been pressured to volunteer in a lab — most Australian students don’t do any undergraduate research unless they enroll in an extra honours year, because the law prohibits unpaid student placements that are not a course requirement. This hasn’t held back overall research productivity in Australia, but it is a stark contrast to the North American environment, where many undergraduates feel pressure to get research experience as soon as they begin university. Most graduate medical students, for example, have previous research experience, and North American graduate schools have come to expect this from applicants. In Canada, nearly 90% of graduate medical students have past research experience1. Numerous articles extol2,3,4 the virtues of undergraduate research experience, but, unfortunately, evidence supporting the benefits of undergraduate research is limited. Most studies on the topic rely exclusively on self-reports that are corroborated less than 10% of the time by studies using more-direct measurements. For example, surveys find that undergraduate student researchers say that they have developed data-analysis skills — something that would normally involve lots of practical work — yet, when interviewed, most of them admit to never having done any data analysis. Like many postdoctoral researchers and graduate students, I spend most of my time with undergraduate students working on technical skills that they might need to work in the lab, but that don’t necessarily improve their conceptual understanding. For example, if I teach a student how to use a cryostat, they might become proficient in slicing brains, but they won’t necessarily learn how synaptic transmission works. Even if we manage to instil excitement for the intricacies of research in our undergraduate students, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that for the vast majority that continue in academic research, there will be no permanent jobs — we might just be saddling our undergraduates with unrealistic expectations. So how do we avoid wasting our time as mentors and our students’ time as learners and researchers? Here are my suggestions. Consider long-term goals. Undergraduate students should reflect on how their research experiences will prepare them for professional success. Should they be aiming for research experiences that are based on their courses, because it will better improve their understanding of scientific concepts? Will a given opportunity help them to reach their career goals by getting into a professional graduate programme? Can they commit to staying with a research programme long enough to become effective and potentially be a co-author? Acknowledge and offset opportunity cost. Undergraduate research requires significant time investments from both students and research supervisors. Undertaking such research might mean forgoing paid employment or other experiences, such as student societies, sport, performing arts or campus journalism and politics. Mentors can help undergraduate students by facilitating summer-scholarship applications or finding ways for students to get course credit for their work. Train for diverse careers. Most undergraduate students will pursue non-research careers or join professional graduate programmes. Those who try to continue in academia will eventually face a bleak post-PhD academic job market. Just as PhD students need preparation for a wide range of careers, so do undergraduate students need to build a transferable skill set. Mentors can encourage undergraduate students to build communication skills by, for example, encouraging them to present in lab meetings, or facilitating teamwork by having groups of undergraduate students complete a project together. Improve undergraduate research experiences. There’s limited non-anecdotal evidence that undergraduate research improves a given lab’s research productivity, or even student learning, but such research isn’t necessarily a waste of time. Before undergraduate students pad their CVs with research experience, they should reflect on what they will achieve by conducting research, and they should seek out meaningful projects to work on and develop relevant skills for their future career. For mentors, we have an obligation to consider the career development of undergraduate students and, for the sake of our publication records, we should aim to work with students who can commit at least a year to our projects. And, as much as possible, we should try to take the pressure off undergraduate students to do research, so that it can be an enjoyable learning experience rather than a box they need to check. doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-07427-5 This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged. You can get in touch with the editor at naturejobseditor@nature.com.   References 1. Klowak, J., Elsharawi, R., Whyte, R., Costa, A. & Riva, J. Can. Med. Educ. J. 9, e4–e13 (2018). PubMed Google Scholar 2. Smaglik, P. Nature 518, 127–128 (2015). PubMed Article Google Scholar 3. Ankrum, J. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05823-5 (2018). Article Google Scholar 4. Trant, J. Nature 560, 307 (2018). Article Google Scholar Download references

Tomasz Głowacki’s career now straddles academia and industry, thanks to his participation in a leadership programme organized by the Polish government. In 2007, when I started work as a research and teaching assistant at Poznań University of Technology in Poland (a job that straddled bioinformatics research and teaching discrete mathematics, algorithms and data structures), I thought academia would be a lifelong career. I enjoyed the intellectual freedom, chance to work on challenging problems and travel opportunities. Shortly after defending my computer-science PhD thesis in 2013, I secured a place on the Polish government’s Top 500 Innovators initiative, a nine-week programme in research commercialization and management at universities with high positions in the Academic Ranking of World Universities. It was set up because the Polish government thought a lack of cooperation between researchers and business was one of the main reasons for the country’s low position in European Innovation Scoreboard rankings. The focus at my interview was how to commercialize my research results. I was asked about factors such as potential customers, business models and pricing. Two months later, I was one of 500 scientists sent either to the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford University, California; or the University of Cambridge, UK. The goal was to learn from the very best researchers and business practitioners. While at the Walter A. Haas School of Business at Berkeley, I spent time with researchers, practitioners and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley. What surprised me the most was the marriage between business and academic institutions in California. Lecturers shared their experiences of research commercialization, business and start-up firms. This was very different from Poland, where a scientific career does not recognize commercial activities in terms of cooperation between business and academia. In my experience, many Polish scientists see commercialization activities as a roadblock to their academic careers. During the Berkeley training, I heard how PhD students can successfully transition into business. These lectures were delivered by Peter Fiske, who is now director of the Water Energy Resilience Research Institute at Berkeley Lab, and whose career straddles both industry and academia. Fiske focused on transferable skills between academia and business, covering data analysis, resourcefulness, technological awareness, resilience, project management, problem solving, English proficiency and good written communication. Fiske is a strong advocate of the need to market yourself as a scientist. Mark Rittenberg, a business and leadership communications specialist at Haas School of Business, taught us about the power of communication and storytelling. As scientists, we focus mostly on research results. We tend to think that the content we present is enough to sell ourselves. But in business, how you present yourself, self-confidence, an interesting story and non-verbal communication are of at least the same importance. The innovators programme included one-day visits to technology companies in Silicon Valley, and the opportunity to undertake internships at some of them. I visited Google, the software companies Splunk and Autodesk, as well as NASA and biotechnology firm Genentech. These visits helped me to understand that ambitious work and challenging problems are not just the domain of universities. I did a three-week internship at PAX Water Technologies in Richmond, California, where I was one of five Polish scientists who set up an interdisciplinary team to work on reducing household water consumption. This was a long way from our research topics, and a new area for all of us. Willingness to learn new things, self-curiosity, creativeness and being open to unexplored areas helped us to drill down into the problem and to propose a solution. All of these are standard skills for a scientist. The programme helped me to understand that scientists can be effective and successful outside academia, and that the business world is full of challenging problems to work on. But the most important conclusion for me is that the applied aspect of what I do matters the most. The best fit for me seemed to be a transition into business. Between June and September 2013, after completing the innovators programme, I applied for several research and development positions in business. I prepared a long CV that covered my research achievements. No one got back to me. It was an important lesson. As scientists, we have to understand how our skills fit current job-market demands. So I connected with some old university friends who were working in business to discuss their interview experience. I decided to revamp my CV by making the description of my education shorter and focusing on my transferable skills; I included organizational skills, experience of data-analysis techniques, language skills and my structured approach to problem solving. As scientists we focus more on problems and solutions when we describe our work. But a potential business employer is more interested in how you get there. You should focus on the tools and methods you have used, knowledge of foreign languages, and how you organize and report your work. In 2013, I found a job as an analyst at BAE Systems Applied Intelligence at its new offices in Poznań, working with IT systems and insurance data to detect customer fraud. A year later, I discussed my transition with Fiske, who told me: “Now that you are on the other side, don’t lose touch with your friends in academia — seek ways to help them be more relevant to the outside world.” I wanted to give something back and to find my own way to contribute to the academic world. I am now head of product development at Analyx, an international marketing data-analytics company, and also work part-time at Poznań School of Banking as a business practitioner, teaching project management as well as systems analysis and design. I discuss the real business cases I face with my students. I also organize lectures and meetings for students with business experts, chief executives and consultants. Some of these have started long-term academic collaborations, and they provide a great opportunity for students to learn from practitioners and to land internships. I have managed to organize a master’s programme between academia and business. Students have the chance to get involved in hot industry topics supervised by business experts, and to present results and defend their theses at their universities. Teaching based on my personal experience is more satisfying for me. Leaving academia was not a failure. It helped me to explore new opportunities, to better understand my professional expectations and to find the career path that fits me best. This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged. You can get in touch with the editor at naturecareerseditor@nature.com.

With the most to lose from looming federal funding cuts, California's researchers take a stand. In December 2016, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, the governor of California, Jerry Brown, declared that if the new Trump administration stopped monitoring the Earth's climate with federal satellites, the Golden State would “launch its own damn satellites.” Brown's response followed earlier comments from a senior advisor to then president-elect Donald Trump proposing the elimination of funding for NASA's Earth science division. It was the first of many rumours, culminating in deep reductions to federal science spending in the president's proposed budget for 2018. The announcements have coincided with moves to restrict immigration, including a sweeping review of the visa programme used by research institutions to employ foreign scientists. “We've got scientists, we've got lawyers, and we're ready to fight,” said Brown to resounding applause from the crowd of climate scientists. But scientists in California are doing much more than cheering and clapping. Like Brown, they are using their political voice to challenge what they feel has been a gradual erosion of evidence-based policy-making. “From climate change to food scarcity to income inequality, we need people in office who can think creatively and use evidence to make decisions,” says Jess Phoenix, a geologist who studies active and extinct volcanoes across four continents. In April, she announced her decision to run for Congress to represent her home district north of Los Angeles. “We need scientists to take a stand,” she says. Cutting it close California, the most populous state in the US, has long been a science stronghold. With a weighted fractional count (WFC) of around 3,000, the research output of institutions in California in the Nature Index is nearly double that of its closest competitor, Massachusetts. For every 1,000 scientists and engineers working in the state in 2014, the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted it 45 patents — the highest in the country. Part of the state's research dominance can be explained by the large number of life, physical and social scientists employed in California — almost three times as many as in Massachusetts. In 2016, California received 15% of the total US allocation for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF), which was the largest share for any state, amounting to US$4.6 billion. But from its position at the pinnacle of research, California stands to lose more than any other state from the cuts to science funding proposed by the Trump administration. Trump's budget outline, released in May 2017, calls for slashing the spend by 18% for the NIH and by 11% for the NSF. California's losses would be likely to have far-reaching implications for the research output of the wider scientific community, given that many scientists in the state collaborate with peers across the country, and the world. In 2016, institutions in California formed more than 8,400 partnerships with counterparts in other states to co-author papers included in the index — the highest in the country. California's institutions also formed the most partnerships with institutions outside the US. Of course, a budget blueprint is just a president's wish list and an actual budget has to pass through Congress, which has largely rejected slashing funding for scientific research. The budget reconciliation for 2017 added money to federal science agencies. There is much trepidation among scientists about what cuts will pass Congress. “We are in a period of significant uncertainty,” says Randolph Hall, vice president of research at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. Jess Phoenix leads educational non-profit, Blueprint Earth, and is running for Congress. If federal funding is cut, California researchers will be looking for more money from the state's budget, foundations and industry. Corporate funding currently makes up about 5% of research money, and private foundations 5–10%. State funding ranges from 2% or less at private institutions like USC, up to 11% at the public University of California system. “While we might hope for these funds to rise in the future, it won't ever come close to the amount from federal funding agencies,” says Hall, who is also the incoming president of the University Industry Demonstration Partnership, an organization that enables interactions between industry and academia. People politics Research also requires a reliable supply of talented people. Universities are concerned that reviews of visa policies, such as the 90-day ban on travellers from six Muslim-majority nations, and the more recent restrictions on visitors from a revised list of seven countries may affect their ability to attract and retain the world's best researchers. When Trump's travel ban first went into effect in January 2017, Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, Davis, was considering a candidate from Iran, one of the countries on the banned list, for a professor position. The selection panel decided that a different candidate was better qualified, but the administration's announcement raised many concerns about whether the suspension on travel barred them from hiring an Iranian. Reforms to the H-1B visa for highly skilled foreign workers could also hinder university recruitment. Universities in California employed more than 3,000 H-1B visa workers in 2015, according to the Office of Foreign Labor Certification. H-1B visas are becoming even more important for universities because fewer US citizens and permanent residents are pursuing advanced degrees in science. In 2014, 25% of the students enrolled in graduate programmes in the US were temporary residents, compared to 21% in 2000. “Universities would be impoverished and the ability to hire scientists would be reduced if the programme changed,” says Peri. In an analysis of US metro areas between 1990 and 2010, he found a 1% increase in the number of foreigners filling scientific and technical positions increased the average income of college-educated native workers by 5–6% in that area. The H-1B visa programme does not appear to be at immediate risk. But processing times have lengthened since the Department of Homeland Security suspended fast-track processing of H1-B applications in April 2017. State-level collaboration In 2016, institutions in California formed close to 9,500 bilateral partnerships with institutions across the country to co-author papers included in the index. The top 20 states that California institutions formed research links with are ranked by the number of bilateral partnerships. Global research hub California is the most collaborative state in the United States, forming the most domestic and international bilateral institutional partnerships. The top 10 most collaborative states in the country are ranked by their total number of bilateral partnerships. Run, scientists, run The current political climate has inspired some Californian researchers to look beyond the lab. Following the 2016 election, Phoenix found herself drawn into politics. She was dismayed to learn that her congressional representative, a member of the House Science Committee, does not believe that the federal government should regulate greenhouse gas emissions. In April 2017, she decided to challenge for the seat in the upcoming 2018 midterm elections. Days later, she spoke at a March for Science rally in Los Angeles defending scientific research and informed decision-making. “I'm 35. No-one else is going to get involved politically for me,” says Phoenix, who runs an educational non-profit called Blueprint Earth and is a fellow at New York-based professional science society, The Explorers Club. “Scientists have been shocked by the incompetence at every level of elected office.” Kevork Abazajian, a physicist studying the origins of the Universe at the University of California, Irvine, is also considering a run for city council — a local office. He hopes to get the town of Irvine to take more action on climate change, for one thing. “After the November election, scientists have been shocked by the degree of incompetence at almost every level of elected office,” he says. “There is a history of scientists going into elected office in other countries, and that's what we need more of.” Abazajian is also the California coordinator for 314 Action, a non-profit group that supports science-savvy candidates and policies. Since January, the group (whose name comes from the value of the mathematical constant π) has organized two training sessions in Washington DC and California for scientists interested in running for office. Training included fundraising and crafting a message that sticks with voters. “You have to be a good messenger,” says Abazajian. 314 Action has also supported stem cell researcher, Hans Keirstead, in California, along with volcanologist Phoenix, in their bids for Congress in 2018. Adding more scientists would shake up the decision-making process: currently only one of the 535 representatives and senators is a practising scientist with a doctoral degree — physicist, Bill Foster, of Illinois. “When California leads, the world follows,” says Phoenix. “Now, more than ever, we are called to bring truly representative democracy to the fore.” Search our job roles in California  

Universities aid entrepreneurs by helping them to turn their research into companies. In return, universities can reap financial benefits. Michael Schrader knew he wanted to create a company, but he wasn't sure what it should do. After six years as a mechanical engineer in the automotive industry building plastic parts, in 2010 he began a master's degree in business administration at Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts. In his quest for inspiration, he took a course in commercializing science at the Harvard Innovation Lab (i-lab). The class heard presentations from researchers who among them had developed 17 different technologies that they thought had commercial value. One in particular caught Schrader's attention — a method devised by two engineers from Tufts University that uses a silk protein to stabilize vaccines. The vaccines could be formulated as powders and mixed with water when it was time to inject them, or embedded into a film that dissolves on the tongue like a breath-freshening strip. And, because they would not need to be refrigerated, they would be easier than conventional vaccines to distribute in places such as sub-Saharan Africa. Along with other members of his class — an economics master's student, a former physics student earning a law degree and a postdoc in the chemistry department — Schrader spent the next few months looking into potential markets for the technology, making connections with business mentors and investors, and putting together a business plan. In 2012, the team founded Vaxess Technologies, which is attempting to bring vaccine formulations to market. “We probably are a perfect model for how universities can forge together entrepreneurs and technologies to create companies,” says Schrader, now chief executive of Vaxess. The technology has not yet entered clinical testing, but the company has raised more than US$5 million, hired 11 employees, and started filing patents of its own in addition to those it licensed from Tufts University. Although universities often license technology developed in their research laboratories to existing companies that are looking for new products, they also move discoveries off the bench and into the real world by encouraging inventors to start businesses from scratch. They offer classes in entrepreneurship, introduce researchers to investors and business experts, and even launch their own venture-capital funds. The path is trickier for life-sciences spin-offs, which take more time and money to get off the ground, than for companies based on software or electronics. And Europe has not caught up with the United States in its ability to create businesses. But universities are banking on entrepreneurs turning some of their research into products (see 'Start-up sampler'). Table 1: Start-up sampler Universities seeking to commercialize research spin off scores of companies. These examples show the range of entrepreneurship spawned in the life sciences. Full size table Hubs of innovation “We exist on taxpayer money. We have an obligation to try to get our research out into society.” Universities tend to see commercialization as part of their remit to create and disseminate knowledge. “We exist on taxpayer money. We have an obligation to try to get our research out into society,” says Regis Kelly, director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences known as QB3. The institute is a collaboration between the Berkeley, Santa Cruz and San Francisco campuses of the University of California. It supports life-sciences research across the campuses and tries to bring that research to market by partnering with industry and promoting entrepreneurship. Part of the mission of the University of Colorado Boulder's BioFrontiers Institute is to aid students and faculty members who want to start new companies, says Jana Watson-Capps, associate director of the institute. “It fits with what we want to do in providing an education for our students so that they can find jobs and be good at those jobs,” she says. A similar attitude is common in the United Kingdom. “We think it's important here in Oxford to see that the fruits of our research are actually developed to benefit society,” says Linda Naylor, managing director of Isis Innovation, a company created by the University of Oxford to commercialize its research. Harvard's i-lab, which was opened in late 2011 to help students in any of the university's schools to develop businesses, is a relatively new entry in a long line of such efforts at many academic institutions. Students learn about idea generation, business-plan development and marketing. Budding entrepreneurs can attend workshops on specific hurdles that they are likely to encounter, such as how to apply for a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the federal government. A group of 'experts in residence' provides students with business expertise and introduces them to potential investors. The i-lab holds competitions such as the President's Challenge, which awards ideas that address the world's big problems. Vaxess took the challenge's top prize of $70,000 in 2012, as well as winning $25,000 in Harvard's Business Plan Contest the same year. Because the main thrust of the i-lab is education, the university never takes a stake in any of the companies created there, says managing director Jodi Goldstein. Any intellectual property developed in a Harvard research lab belongs to the university and must be licensed, but ideas generated in the i-lab belong to the students. Goldstein hopes that the i-lab can help a future Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates to pursue their billion-dollar idea while still completing their degree. “We have several pretty famous dropouts around here, and I don't think that's necessary anymore,” she says. As well as education and expertise, the i-lab provides a workspace for fledging companies. Meeting rooms, computer workstations and private storage space are available, as are a workshop for building prototypes and a pair of 3D printers. The i-lab is also planning to address one of the stumbling blocks that often trips up biology-based companies: finding a space to turn a discovery made in a university lab into a more marketable version. It is building a 1,400-square-metre wet lab with 36 research benches. When Vaxess reached that stage, it moved to LabCentral in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The provider of office and laboratory space takes care of regulatory requirements and provides administrative support and laboratory personnel so that new companies don't have to spend time and money setting up their own space. It opened in 2013 with a $5-million grant from the Massachusetts government (part of an initiative to bolster life-sciences business in the state) along with support from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the venture-capital arm of health-care giant Johnson & Johnson. Schrader considers this industry–government–academia web of support essential to his company's launch. “We have really taken advantage of this growing entrepreneurial ecosystem,” he says. At QB3 in California, start-ups can rent lab space for as little as $85–100 per square metre per month. Unlike conventional landlords, who prefer to rent out an entire space, start-ups can rent a few hours in a fume cupboard or a shelf in a freezer, for example. “You only pay for what you actually use,” Kelly says. Charging is important, mainly because it is a way of weaning its users off the university teat. “It gets people more used to being in the private sector,” he says. The need for lab space is just one reason why starting a life-sciences company can be much more challenging than, say, launching a business based on software. Any sort of pharmaceutical or medical device is subject to regulatory requirements, which leads to safety tests and clinical trials “If you're going to make a new drug you might need ten years and a billion dollars,” says Watson-Capps. These time and capital requirements make it much more difficult to drum up investment for a life-sciences start-up. Although investors might be willing to risk a couple of hundred thousand dollars on a promising software idea, most life-sciences companies need initial funding of a few million dollars. “Obviously, people don't want to throw away a million dollars, so they have to do a lot more due diligence,” Kelly says. And because the time to realize a return on the investment can be so long, trading equity in the company in exchange for, say, legal services is not as popular as it is for other types of start-ups, he adds. These disparities are apparent in the investment statistics. Of the $77.3 billion in venture capital invested in the United States in 2015, software companies took in $31.2 billion — 40% of the total. Pharmaceuticals and biotechnology received a mere 12%. Playing catch up Europe lags behind the United States in producing start-ups of any kind, but the situation is improving. “We're certainly seeing a lot more spin-outs than we were a few years ago,” says Naylor. “There is more money around that is willing to go into the early stage.” Vaxess Technologies are using silk proteins (L), which are extracted from cocoons (R), to stabilize vaccines. Image: Patrick Ho/Vaxess She attributes that growth, in part, to the UK government's creation of the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme in 2012, which provides tax breaks to investors in start-up companies. “The UK has been one of the leaders in providing tax incentives for investors in start-ups of all types,” says Karen Wilson, who studies entrepreneurship and innovation at Bruegel, an economic think tank in Brussels. Other countries across Europe, as well as Australia, have created their own tax incentives for investors modelled on the British scheme, although Wilson says that they're often controversial, derided as tax breaks for the wealthy. In the United States, tax incentives vary by state. The biggest legal change in the United States to promote spin-offs came in 1980, Wilson says, with the passage of the Bayh–Dole act, which allowed researchers to profit from inventions created with federal funding. US and UK Universities have even been creating their own venture funds in recent years to invest in their spin-offs. The University of Cambridge, UK, created Cambridge Innovation Capital in 2013 with an initial fund of £50 million ($71 million). In 2014, the University of California began a $250-million fund. In May 2015, Isis launched Oxford Sciences Innovation to raise an initial £300 million from investors. And, in January, University College London opened the £50 million UCL Technology Fund, and the University of Bristol, UK, started its own enterprise fund (see 'Innovation income'). Box 1: Licensing technology: Innovation income When it comes to commercializing research, universities often emphasize their desire to spread their discoveries, but they also reap financial rewards from licensing technology and investing in spin-off companies. Isis Innovation, for instance, took in £24.6 million (US$34.9 million) in revenue in 2015, of which it returned £13.6 million to its founder Oxford University, UK, more than double 2014's £6.7 million. The university also earned more than £30 million in cash and stocks from the 2014 sale of the games and technology company NaturalMotion (in which it had a stake of about 9%) to Zynga in San Francisco, California, for $527 million. NaturalMotion was co-founded in 2001 by Torstein Reil, then a PhD student in Oxford's zoology department studying neural systems. Reil used his research to create computer simulations that more accurately mimic how animals move, and turned them into a company that makes popular games such as Clumsy Ninja. But licensing income tends to make up only a small part of a university's revenue stream. Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which last year issued 50 licenses to patents it owns and saw 14 firms started on the basis of its technology, had licensing revenue of $16.1 million in 2015. But that is a fraction of Harvard's 2015 budget of nearly $4.5 billion, of which the university spent $876 million on research. Jana Watson-Capps, associate director of the University of Colorado Boulder's BioFrontiers Institute, says that income from all licensing — not just from spin-off companies — is valuable to the university and goes back into funding research. However, she adds, licensing income is relatively small and comes so long after the initial investment that it's not a major consideration at the institute. A similar attitude prevails at Oxford. Although the university welcomes the licensing income, it's not the only motive for promoting spin-offs, says Linda Naylor, managing director of Isis Innovation. “The university is very clear it wants to create impact,” she says. “They're not there to make any quick money.” Show more Entrepreneurial ecosystems in which inventors can find facilities, investors and business experts to help them to launch their companies are important for creating successful spin-offs, and they've been growing around many European universities, Wilson says. “There are an increasing number of these entrepreneurial hubs that are emerging across Europe, which are spawning these innovative high-growth firms,” she says. In the United Kingdom, Cambridge is popular for life-sciences start-ups, and in Munich, Germany, the focus is mobile technology. In Switzerland, start-ups are clustered around the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, where they focus on computing and technology. In Finland, Espoo is a hub: in 2010, three institutions combined to form Aalto University, which has strengths in communications, energy and design. Linked by a bridge across the Øresund strait, Copenhagen and Malmo in Sweden, make up another life-sciences centre. In the past year, however, the influx of refugees from the Middle East has led to a tightening of border security and made crossing the bridge more difficult for everyone. The clampdown on migration within Europe, says Wilson, is making it harder for fledging companies to grow and spread. Expansion of their markets has always been challenging for start-ups in Europe, she says, where pushing into another country means dealing with differences not only in language and culture but also in taxes and other regulations. Many European companies get to a point at which, when they need to grow into a bigger market, they move to the United States, either of their own accord or at the insistence of their investors. “If you have a successful start-up in Italy it's much easier to go scale it in the US than it is to try to scale it across Europe,” Wilson says. But many life-sciences companies won't grow on their own, particularly if their innovation is a drug — their endgame is often to be acquired by a large pharmaceutical company once they have advanced their therapy to a promising stage. Although life-sciences companies demand more resources than other types of start-up, they have one characteristic that can make them uniquely appealing to investors — the potential for curing a disease or improving human health. As Kelly points out, “Almost any rich person has a sick relative.” If investors are going to risk their money, knowing that many of the companies they invest in will fail, they may prefer investments that have a potential for making a difference, he says. “If they're going to lose money on a business, they might as well lose it on something that could have some benefit to society.”   Search our job roles in California

Scientific innovation has long powered the San Francisco Bay Area’s economy, but community and political challenges could undermine progress. From the integrated circuit to synthetic insulin, mail-order genetic tests and ride sharing, scientific discoveries and technologies developed by researchers and engineers in the San Francisco Bay Area have fuelled the local economy for decades.   Part of Nature Index 2018 Science Cities But while politicians and urban planners around the world try to emulate the Bay Area’s path to economic success through research prowess, locals and social scientists are asking whether the region’s model of growth is sustainable. The Bay Area is burdened by the high cost of housing, income inequality, homelessness, gridlocked traffic, and inadequate public transportation. These threaten to undermine the region’s status as an economic dynamo. “The viability of the innovation economy is in question,” says Benjamin Grant, a director at the non-profit San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR). “The problems the Bay Area is facing are the problems of success,” says Grant. The northern California metropolis is among the top 50 science cities in the Nature Index, measured by its contribution to the authorship of 82 high-quality research journals. When assessed solely on the output of its corporate institutions, it ranks number one. The question is whether the Bay Area can, in the face of mounting social problems, retain these companies and the brilliant researchers whose work they depend on. Network effects In the 1970s, the Boston area, with its prestigious universities and long-established corporations, would have been a good bet to become the tech industry hub, says AnnaLee Saxenian, a political scientist and dean of the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. But an unusual culture in the Bay Area of open exchange between researchers, companies and universities, as well as strong ties to venture capital, she says, fostered science and engineering research, particularly in Silicon Valley. This sharing and information free-flow arose, in part, from the values of the 1960s hippie counterculture, which was centred in San Francisco. “Engineers were reacting against the corporate culture of the east coast,” says Saxenian. Talented scientists and engineers came to the Bay Area from around the world to have access to networks, prototyping and venture funds. And venture capitalists looking for the next big thing, says Saxenian, found it in labs at Stanford University, and at the University of California’s campuses in San Francisco, Davis and Berkeley. Source: Nature Index The city has attracted many high-achieving scientists in the natural sciences. Zora Modrusan, who develops gene sequencing and analysis techniques at the biotech company Genentech, says the strength of the biotech industry drew her to the Bay Area from Canada 19 years ago. “It’s very dynamic and interactive,” she says. Since 2015, Modrusan has co-authored some 20 articles in the index journals, developing methods for analysing the functional significance of genetic changes in cancer and other diseases. Her current work seeks insights into the heterogeneity within tumours. James Hedrick, a materials scientist at IBM Research–Almaden in San Jose, says his work has benefited from exchanges with the region’s biologists, machine-learning experts, and catalysis chemists. Hedrick engineers new polymers and has co-authored more than a dozen articles in index journals over the past three years. Initially, IBM was using these materials in part of its chip-making process; now, Hedrick is developing them for devices to deliver targeted drug therapies. Source: Nature Index Backlash If you ask a local in San Francisco, you might hear a different take on what the Bay Area’s booming innovation economy means: inadequate public transportation and gridlocked traffic (made all the more galling by the privately owned ‘tech buses’ pulling into public bus stops), growing income inequality, the displacement of communities of colour, and homelessness. Perhaps the most severe challenge in the region is housing. Real estate company Zillow estimates that the median monthly price for a two-bedroom rental in San Francisco averages US$4,130, towering over the nationwide average of US$1,442, and more than a thousand dollars above New York and Boston. At last count, in January 2017, there were 7,499 homeless people in the city; these numbers have remained fairly steady since 2013. Grant says the current crop of innovation-driven companies has failed to engage with these civic problems. For better or for worse, he says, “the world of research and innovation has been a world apart in California.” Source: Nature Index/Dimensions from Digital Science Although the tech industry has increased demand for housing and driven up prices, it does not carry the full blame for the city’s social ills, says Alex Schafran, a geographer at the University of Leeds, in the United Kingdom, who studies California’s housing crisis. Broader cultural forces and political failures have contributed. Most people agree that the Bay Area needs more housing, but no one wants tall buildings to go up in their own neighbourhoods, says Grant. And under California’s system of government, even if regional planning authorities agree on the need for more housing and public transit, local communities can veto such construction. Building outside developed areas is restricted by conservation regulations that protect large swaths of park lands. These woes are eroding quality of life in the Bay Area, says Grant, and making it ever more difficult for companies and universities to hire and retain the best researchers and students. Companies are also beginning to move elsewhere, he says. As further evidence of the trend, San Francisco’s output in the index has declined in recent years, from a fractional count of 1,723.8 in 2012 to 1,676.35 in 2017. Such regional declines are hardly unprecedented. “At one time Detroit was the centre of innovation in the United States, and Detroit collapsed,” says Grant. But he sees hope in moves by state legislators. California Senate Bill 827, introduced in January 2018 by San Francisco’s State Senator Scott Wiener, would have enabled the construction of more housing near public transportation hubs. The bill didn’t pass, but that it was even proposed is a sign that the tides may be shifting, says Grant. Source: Nature Index Saxenian is more reserved in her projections, and for good reason. Her first paper about Silicon Valley predicted that the high cost of living would drive the tech industry out of the area. That was in the 1980s. “I was wrong,” she says. The same conditions that drove the development of the Bay Area’s strong culture of scientific innovation make it resilient. Saxenian sees other threats to research innovation in the Bay Area: repeated cuts to the University of California’s budget, and restrictive immigration policies, in particular. “Immigration has been beneficial both to the Bay Area and to other countries,” says Saxenian, who has written a book (The New Argonauts) on the subject. “Talent goes both ways,” she says. But this mutual benefit gets lost in the national political conversation. Schafran, who grew up in the Bay Area, says researchers and engineers need to get more involved in addressing its social ills — but there are no quick fixes. Since they’ve been building for decades, “it’s gonna take another 30 years to get ourselves out of it,” he says. “We can’t do this overnight.” If researchers remain detached and don’t think locally, it could be to their own detriment. “You may be on the top of the world for the moment, but don’t get too comfortable,” says Grant. This article is part of Nature Index 2018 Science Cities, an editorially independent supplement. Advertisers have no influence over the content. Search our job roles in California

Although faculty members transition from industry to academia (and vice-versa), it’s rare to go back and forth. How does each setting help a researcher grow, and what skills are critical in both environments? Sam King offers his insight. Five years ago, I left my tenured position in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to push myself intellectually and professionally in industry. During these years, I started a company (Adrenaline Mobility), sold my company to Twitter, worked as a software engineer, managed a two-person team, managed a 25-person organization, battled overseas fraudsters and fake accounts, and led a nine-month project (an eternity in industry) that ended up being the largest growth initiative in the history of Twitter. Now, I’m back in academia — at the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis. Why? My transition to industry began when I was on sabbatical from Illinois to work on my startup in California, where we were working on ways to make it easy for other programmers to add encryption to their apps. The startup was born out of my academic research on digital security, and, after a couple of years, Twitter bought it. Suddenly, I had a decision to make: work at Twitter in San Francisco, or stay in academia. In the end, I left. Although I enjoyed the work and the stability, I wanted to step outside my comfort zone, and I wanted to experience the entire process of taking an idea all the way to production — instead of forgotten in a paper as so often happens in academia. I wanted to have impact, too: software developed in a research setting is used rarely outside of academia; industry provided an opportunity for other people to use the things I made. I spent two years at Twitter working on preventing fake accounts and improving security, before Lyft (a North America-only Uber competitor) recruited me away to help with fraud, where I spent another two years. What I learnt One of the unique aspects of industry that I enjoyed the most was the fast pace. At Twitter and Lyft most of my teams were focused on security. Both apps face active and worthy adversaries that regularly try to hack Twitter and Lyft accounts — or create fake accounts which could be used to make money. At Twitter, they could use compromised or fake accounts to send spam, and at Lyft they could use them to get free rides. In other words, I got to fight against bad guys. The faster we moved, the more successful we were in protecting our users and systems. In industry, you are always interacting with others, leading or building teams. There is more value in being able to manage people, having technical breadth and being able to see — and adapt to — a big-picture vision. You have access to a huge number of users, and the solutions you devise must be straightforward and simple to implement because they have to be carried out at a large scale. As a result, the impact you can have is tremendous. For example, signing up for a new account is a deceptively complex process at Twitter. From a user’s perspective, it means filling out three fields in a form and pressing a button. Behind that, Twitter uses vast, intelligent infrastructure to make it easy for genuine users to sign up while keeping bad actors and bots out. Building security to work within this requires respecting Twitter’s hunger to grow, while coordinating with different teams across the business and measuring impact quantitatively. Any changes to the sign up process have a direct and massive impact on the business, so security countermeasures must be well thought out. All of this is hidden behind one little button. In industry, having straightforward solutions is critical: simplicity is king. In academia, you can build complex systems because you’re trying to prove a concept. But in industry, people must be able to use the software you’ve created, which adds a unique set of design constraints. There is an open-endedness to work in academia that I enjoy that doesn’t translate to industry, which is driven by quarterly objectives and stakeholders. When I was in industry, I missed the academic freedom and the ability to create and implement my own vision for research. I also missed working on projects that focused on long-term outcomes (measured in years, not months) and a far-reaching, personal vision. This became a catalyst for my return to academia. I was also motivated by events in my personal life: two years ago, my son was diagnosed with Type I diabetes and I found myself trying to carve out time to research the topic while working in industry. In academia, I knew I could approach the topic with more time and access to additional resources and collaborators at the university. Strangely enough, I also missed failure! In industry, when you work on a successful product, your main job is execution. There are unique challenges and difficult problems, but by and large, a well-executing team in industry fails rarely. When I reflect back on my previous academic experience, the two projects that stick out the most are failed research projects, because we had no idea whether they were going to work. (They didn’t.) Coming back Leaving industry was scary. I was at Lyft, an up-and-coming company with a bright future, I worked with talented people who I trusted and had worked with for many years, and I loved the pace. In fact, each of the four years that I was in industry, people from academia asked me about coming back, and I always turned them down. It wasn’t until UC Davis, with a strong pedigree in security research and a deeply collaborative and collegial faculty, reached out that I even considered coming back to academia. With this, coupled with my motivation to help my son and desire to work on long-term research, I came to the realization that to pursue my own interests in research successfully, I had to come back to academia. When I came back to academia, it wasn’t a flawless reentry. I was wired to move and think fast, but I had to retrain myself to consume information slowly and deliberately. This adjustment showed up even in banal activities like reading papers: in industry, I was used to skimming articles to get the gist. But in academia, being a specialist means you must dive deep into the literature to understand minute details of other people’s research, compare your work with others’ efforts, and explain the concepts to other people when you teach. In contrast, I noticed that in either setting, and to succeed in any career, you need to have strong communication skills, both written and spoken, to make a case that is both well-laid out and logical. The big difference is that researchers are trained in this skill and practice it often, whereas many software engineers end up picking it up on the job. Upon reflection, having been in academia and industry has given me the best perspectives of both worlds: I am better at managing people, and I know what students encounter as they go through their educational experiences and careers, including going through multiple environments before finding the right fit. The best piece of advice I’d share: don’t be too afraid to make a change — wherever you go, you’ll learn something.   Sam King, Ph.D., is an associate professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis. He returned to academia after spending four years in industry as both the Head of Accounts at Twitter and the Head of Fraud and Identity at Lyft.

Exploring options and thinking laterally about where you can use your scientific skills might be the key to successfully transitioning into industry, learns George Busby. This piece was one of two winners of the Science Innovation Union writing competition, Oxford. “This is downtown San Francisco, our train’s final stop. Can all passengers please detrain? All detrain please. All detrain.” Perhaps it was the heady fug of jetlag that made this broadcast particularly amusing to my UK-English language sensibilities, but I “detrained” all the same and stepped into the crisp morning air of the Californian rush hour. I was on the west coast to visit two genetics start-ups as part of a whirlwind three-day tour of the US. With a long postdoc and several first author papers tucked into my belt, I wanted to see if these credentials would pass muster in the tech haven of Silicon Valley. I’ve always found the loneliness of solo work-travel to be highly amenable to strategic thought, and this American adventure was an opportunity to reflect on why I was there and what I wanted.   Back in Oxford, a few months earlier, I had begun to line-up my post-postdoc career options. A new and exciting big-data research institute has just opened and my supervisors were keen that I apply for money to start my own research group there. Excited by the prospect of doing interesting science somewhere new, I began to piece together the semblance of a research proposal with collaborative support. But then a strange thing happened. As the project began to take shape, the light at the end of the tunnel — the prize of scientific independence — began to feel not closer, but further away. Ahead of me were late nights and early mornings of writing pages and pages of a scientific proposal. After that, a year-long wait to find out that I’d been unsuccessful (a mere 15-20% of applicants for an early career Wellcome Trust Sir Henry Dale Fellowship get funded). Despite everything, my future was dependent on a number of factors that were out of my control. On top of this, there was the burgeoning realisation that no one actually reads the academic papers that I write. This is no moot point: writing papers is the main purview of a research scientist, and the central way we both communicate our results and measure success. However, compared to the proportion of the world’s population who can read, the number of people that had sat down to ingest my latest, dense, and fascinating (to me at least) treaty on the population genetics of Africa, three years in the making, was minuscule. The words of a colleague rang in my head: “99.9% of scientific papers just don’t get read”. Did I really want to spend the next 18 months slogging it out against funding agencies to get my own money just to do yet more science that no one was going to read? I forced myself to think more fundamentally about what I wanted to do. If I wanted to use my science to make a real and lasting impact and do things that make a real difference in the world, then writing academic papers is only one route to success. So, I blew the cobwebs off my LinkedIn account and started to hit up my small network of commercial contacts to investigate what companies out there in the big wide world might value my hard-won scientific expertise. This led me to California, where the streets are paved with gold and to the heart of the world’s tech industry. I’m by no means the first, and will certainly not be the last, person to have grown tired of the uncertainty of pursuing an academic research career. Despite the best efforts of university career departments, the option of staying in academia has always felt like the only real way to keep doing the science that I wanted to do: any other path would force a compromise or feel like I was quitting. But, perhaps I’d been looking at things the wrong way round. Rather than proposing whatever research was ‘hot’ at any given moment to funding bodies to maintain a decent university career trajectory, I should instead consider what my scientific ambitions are, then find the place to do them without limiting myself to academia. This way of thinking — that I could achieve my scientific objectives without compromise in either academia or industry — has been made possible for two reasons. Firstly, by luck as much as design. I work in a field, human genomics, where there are increasing options for work outside of universities: the number of commercial enterprises is exploding. If there was ever a time to jump into industry, it’s now. Second, I’d underappreciated how employable I am. I’ve led methodological and analytical research projects, written papers, and worked to communicate my science. Coupled with some in-depth genomics knowledge, these are all highly desirable qualities in the biotech world. So I reached out to two Californian companies, both of which do scientific research that’s not a million miles away from my day-to-day. Visiting them allowed me to see with my own eyes how work in industry differed from academia. I was surprised to learn that research jobs at both companies were not purely about making marketable products: there was a certain amount of trial and error to the work that they do, and not all of the research that they do is expected to end up as a viable product. They were also both mature enough to have teams of people working on marketing, accounts, PR, and software engineers, who were supported by the sales of the main product, but not scientists themselves. The possibility of collaborating with these people is exciting, providing new avenues for communicating and justifying the work of the research teams. Importantly, both companies sell my flavour of science to millions of customers — working for them would mean I could impact orders of magnitude more people, orders of magnitude more quickly than any scientific research I could hope to do in a university over the next few years. If impact and scientific reach is what I want, then this seems like a far better way to achieve it than waiting for a year to hear on the unlikely success of a research grant. I was beginning to feel like Lady Justice with my balance scales measuring the benefits and costs of academic versus commercial employment. Sure, academic research is dominated by uncertain funding cycles and can feel glacially slow at times, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Some view it as a privilege to be able to devote one’s time exclusively to fully understanding a specific question, and there’s no denying the satisfaction that comes with finding stuff out. Plus, I’ve been fortunate enough to work with incredibly talented people who’ve given me the intellectual freedom to spend my days thinking about the things that I want to think about. There’s clearly a lot to be said for being able to concentrate on the questions that one believes to be important and worthwhile. But with a wife and a growing family I’ve also reached the age where the pursuit of such scholarly freedom might appear not just selfish, but irresponsible. In common with around a third of UK families, both my wife and I work full time. Without my wife’s additional income, my postdoc salary would give us a higher household income than around 42% of the population. So, despite almost ten years at university (and the debt to prove it) without two incomes, we’d be struggling to get above the median of household earners nationwide. And the double whammy of living in the least affordable city in the UK with the cost of childcare increasing at three times inflation year on year, even with two incomes, there is little monthly return on my educational investment. Moreover, from a purely financial point of view, it pays to work in industry as a life scientist, with salaries being up to 30% higher than academia. As peers from school and university began to financially pull away from me, first by buying cars that are younger than ten years old, and more recently upgrading their small flats for family houses, I’ve consoled myself in the knowledge that although I can’t match them, I’m doing what I love. Who needs things anyway? But when you’re spending a third of your take-home pay on rent and another third on childcare, there’s little chance of saving much of the remaining third. Realising that you’re never going to be able to buy a house in the city where you work starts to get mentally draining. Can I really justify doing the science I do, which, let’s remember, no one actually reads, to just about get by? Of course, I’m far from being a pauper, or even a JAM, but wouldn’t it be nice for either my wife or myself to reduce the hours we work to spend more time with our children, without having to drastically change our quality of life? There is of course risk of job security associated with working in industry, particularly for an early stage start-up. But, there is also risk associated with staying in academia, particularly given the number of PhD and postdoc scientists in the workforce, many of whom will be pushing for the same jobs. And, in industry there is the distinct possibility that your pay could match your scientific success, which is not the case when you’re tied to a public sector pay scale. More than anything, my visit to California not only demonstrated that it’s possible to do interesting and worthwhile science commercially, but that perhaps it’s the only way to do some science. It would take many years and much grant money to generate the sorts of big datasets that some tech companies now have control of. If, as a scientist, you’re interested in answering some of the big questions, perhaps it pays to ask yourself whether the best way to achieve your ambitions is through a start-up, rather than academically. What’s more, at least in genomics, it’s beginning to feel like detraining from the academic express onto the industry platform might be the best way to do the most relevant and engaging science.   George Busby is a postdoctoral research associate in statistical genomics at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford.

Panagiotis Vagenas left Yale University to advise a non-profit on research design and quality. What did you do before Yale? I’m from Greece originally. In 1996 — when I was 17 — I moved to London, UK. I studied biochemistry for my degree and did a PhD in immunology. When I graduated I moved to the Population Council labs at the Rockefeller University in New York to start my postdoc. What did you study? I worked on basic research in HIV. What’s always motivated me is trying to help people — to have a meaningful career in that sense. So in summer 2010 I moved to Yale School of Public Health and did a master’s in public health (MPH), and went on to join the faculty at the Yale School of Medicine in 2013. And then you moved to your current job. Yes – I’d just applied for a K01 grant which didn’t get awarded at the time, which was a big shock. So I figured I should do something different, and what still motivated me was making an impact on people’s lives. So I found the job I have now with Project Concern International (PCI). Where did you get the motivation to make an impact on people’s lives? Really I grew up in an environment that was like that. My mum’s a psychiatrist and my dad’s a civil engineer in the public sector, so while they’re not doing the kind of work I’m doing, it’s always been for the public good. And then I loved biology at school so that was the start of the path that got me here. What does PCI do? Our mission is to enhance health, end hunger, overcome hardship. It’s a really broad mission that wants to help people in the developing world lead better lives. I think a lot of organisations like PCI – which is funded primarily by the US government but also from other sources – appreciate research more and more in tracking the impact and sustainability of their work. Could you give me an example? I was recently in Ethiopia where myself and other members of my team designed a sustainability study for an initiative we ran to empower women in the region. The project ended six years ago for PCI, but women are still meeting and benefitting from our work there. It’s not the old method of development – hand outs, a short project in the field – we want to go into these programmes knowing the impact is sustained. How are you finding the head office in San Diego? I’m enjoying the outdoors culture here in California. Everybody’s out; everybody’s running and hiking and enjoying the beaches year-round. I meet a lot of people from work. My parents came to visit last April and they really enjoyed it. San Diego is paradise.   You can find more of this interview here.

Pursuing a new career makes PhD student Jonathan Wosen feel like a baby goose—and he loves it. Sometimes I ask people, “if you weren’t studying biology, what would you do?” At first, they’re taken aback, and I don’t blame them. PhD students are self-selected for a certain kind of persistent, focused thinking; that’s what it takes to become the world’s leading expert on your thesis project. We are as deeply immersed in our work as a fish in water. That makes asking a graduate student to consider a different field of study a lot like asking a fish to imagine life on dry land. Initially, there’s some flailing of fins and gasping for air, but the answers come. “I think I would do computer science, or engineering.” “Maybe chemistry, or biochemistry. Is that too close to biology to count?” “It would be fun to try math.” In my experience, the responses are all variations on a single theme: most students would opt for some other STEM field. But my answer doesn’t fit the mold. I would go into journalism. From an early age, I was awed by newscasters’ power to shape my perception of the world. With a single report, they could expose corruption, challenge governments, and make me care about people and places I had never heard of. These experiences left me with a deep interest in how news stories are told as well as what and whose stories are told. Nevertheless, science remained my primary passion. Ever since elementary school, when I told my principal that I wanted to be a lab technician, I’ve never considered another career. That’s pretty odd given that there are no scientists in my family, who emigrated from Ethiopia in the 80s before taking up low-wage jobs in east San Diego. I chalk it up to all the hours spent watching Bill Nye the Science Guy and The Magic School Buswhen I wasn’t watching the news. The logic behind applying to graduate school was simple: I wanted to be a scientist, scientists have PhDs, and therefore I should get one. If only what followed had been so straightforward. Progress on my project, which involves growing finicky stem cells to learn about celiac disease, has been excruciatingly slow. I love learning about science and sharing my knowledge with others, but the day-to-day minutiae of my research project does wear me down. Last year, during my third year of graduate school, I was constantly anxious and stressed, and, worst of all, didn’t tell anyone that I was struggling. I felt obligated to stick to the script I had written for myself: the boy who dreamt of becoming a scientist and never stopped until he reached his goal. My family and friends had bought into this narrative too, and I didn’t want to disappoint them. Plus, deep down, I still hoped to become a professor and help diversify academia; it was difficult to think that there would be one fewer black faculty member. At first, I was ambivalent about pursuing a career in science communication, and kept telling myself that I should focus on research. I was interested enough to take a course, though, and there I found a community of students, professors, and professionals who cared as much about public outreach as I did. Part of the reason I first got interested in biomedical research was because of the public benefits of studying health and disease. I realized that empowering people with an understanding of major scientific discoveries was another form of public service. After feeling siloed within my own project, it was refreshing to hear journalists talk about reading up on a wide range of scientific discoveries and having the freedom to ask basic questions. Throughout the course, I could feel my natural excitement and scientific curiosity start to return. I checked out books from the library on science writing, contacted editors for freelancing opportunities, and shared my aspirations with friends and family. So far, their responses have all been positive. So that’s where I’m at right now. I think that finishing my PhD will open new and better opportunities, so that’s the plan. In the meanwhile, I intend to get as much communications experience as I can—blogging, podcasting, and writing for publications in the coming years. In eastern Greenland (trust me, this is relevant), barnacle geese nest in towering, rocky cliffs that keep young goslings away from predators but also away from food. Eventually, the goslings must leave their nests for the green fields below. There’s only one problem: they can’t fly. What they do instead is literally jump off the cliff, spreading their tiny, fluffy bodies to create drag and desperately try to steer themselves towards a (relatively) soft landing. It’s a wonder that any of them survive. In a sense, I feel like one of those goslings right now. Suspended in uncertain airspace, embracing the unknown, steering myself towards a better future. Oh, and hoping that I don’t crash on the way down.   Jonathan Wosen is an immunology PhD student at Stanford. You can expect more writing from this young gosling as he learns to navigate the world of science communication.

SPOTLIGHT ON CALIFORNIA The Golden State has been at the forefront of private sector innovation in the United States for many years. What factors lie behind its success? IN 1938, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, two electrical engineering graduates from Stanford University, started building audio oscillators in a garage in Palo Alto, California. By 1962, their company, Hewlett-Packard (HP), was listed in Fortune magazine's top 500 US companies by revenue. In 1999, it spun off its measurement-instruments business into Agilent Technologies, which broke the record for the largest initial public offering in Silicon Valley history. HP is now one of the world's leading electronics manufacturers, with revenues of US$126 billion in 2010 and more than 320,000 employees worldwide. HP's iconic story — along with those of Apple, Intel, Yahoo and Google — has influenced nearly every fledgling Californian company hoping to repeat its success. It also highlights one of the state's defining features: its strength in industrial research and development (R&D). " California is a key marketplace for the exchange of ideas from around the globe. " Darlene Solomon, Agilent Technologies According to the US National Science Foundation (NSF), California businesses invested US$64 billion in R&D in 2007 — more than Michigan, Massachusetts and New Jersey combined. Overall, California accounts for 22 percent of all R&D in the United States. A long history of high-tech breakthroughs is just one of the factors that have made the Golden State the industrial R&D powerhouse that it is today. It has a “whole ecosystem of innovation”, says Darlene Solomon, chief technology officer at Agilent Technologies, based in Santa Clara. A January 2011 study commissioned by northern Californian life science trade association BayBio and the California Healthcare Institute (CHI) expands on this further, listing the following factors as having helped the state's biomedical industry to thrive: leading-edge science; experienced venture capital; a diverse, well-educated workforce; a group of serial entrepreneurs; a culture that appreciates risk-takers and that does not penalize failure; healthy scepticism about time-honored institutions; and freedom to ignore boundaries. In addition, California's world-class public and private universities attract billions of dollars in federal research funding and produce thousands of US postdoctoral scientists and engineers each year. The state is also home to national laboratories such as Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore. These elements and more apply across industries — from biotechnology to computer technology to renewable energy — and help drive job creation, even in tough economic times. Clusters of innovation California boasts a diverse range of industries spread across several major regional clusters, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Diego. In northern California, Silicon Valley encompasses a chain of cities south of San Francisco — including Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale and San Jose — but the high-tech companies whose products gave the area its name are actually spread throughout the wider San Francisco Bay Area. The semiconductor research the valley is famous for is now translating into solar energy R&D, which makes use of the silicon and thin-film manufacturing technology perfected there. The city of South San Francisco, home to Genentech, is known for its concentration of biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. GENENTECH Biotechnology company Genentech, based in South San Francisco, anticipates continued job growth in the next decade. In southern California, the San Diego area hosts several institutions that have made the city a hub for biomedical research, such as the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the Scripps Research Institute and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. “San Diego has grown up over the last 30 years or so as one of the premier areas for doing biotechnology,” says Paul Laikind, chief business officer of the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute. Laikind, based at Sanford-Burnham's headquarters in La Jolla, north-west San Diego, says biotechnology companies in the city are concentrated in a small area. “Because of that, it's a very collaborative entrepreneurial environment,” he explains. A non-profit institute, Sanford-Burnham has taken advantage of San Diego's industrial infrastructure to help commercialise its research: since 1987 it has spun off about a dozen start-up companies. Laikind himself founded four start-up companies in San Diego, all of which went public, before joining Sanford-Burnham in 2009. He says those in the region involved in biotechnology share a desire to achieve results by working together rather than competing with each other: “Our competition is whether we can make a drug that can work or not, which means a lot of collaboration between companies and institutions like ours.” A further geographical advantage of California is the state's west coast location, which makes it a natural crossroads for international scientists and engineers. “California is a key marketplace for the exchange of ideas from around the globe,” says Agilent's Solomon. “Especially as Asia has taken off, I think California has been positioned [in the market] very well as a point of access and a good cultural fit in terms of that emerging growth.” Money magnet   Although California's domination in industrial R&D has been achieved largely through the efforts of the private sector, the state does provide generous incentives for businesses to do science. Companies that increase their R&D investment from the previous year get a tax credit equivalent to 15 percent of the difference, says Andrea Jackson, director of state and government affairs for Genentech. “[The California government is] always incentivizing companies to do more R&D,” she says. According to the California Budget Project, which carries out independent fiscal and policy analysis, 2,483 corporations claimed US$1.2 billion in R&D credits in 2008. In return, companies in California are generous about reinvesting their earnings in R&D. Agilent dedicates around 10 percent of its roughly US$6.5 billion annual revenue to R&D globally, a proportion that Solomon says is above average among its peers. “In some of our businesses, where we're focusing on future growth, we're investing far more than that 10 percent,” she adds. California also attracts far and away the most venture capital (VC) in the United States — US$11.6 billion in 2010, nearly five times as much as the second ranked state, Massachusetts. Furthermore, California ranks first in the country in number of jobs and revenues for venture-backed companies, according to a 2011 study by global business analysts IHS for the US National Venture Capital Association, with 60 percent of the VC investments in California going to the software, energy, and biotechnology sectors. Academic prowess SANFORD-BURNHAM MEDICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, a non-profit institute, has spun off around a dozen companies since 1987. Industrial innovation in California is well supported by its academic institutions. Stanford University, a private institution, is based at the heart of Silicon Valley and fosters strong relationships with companies — many of which are based at the Stanford Research Park, founded in 1951 when the university leased some of its land to emerging technology firms. The research park offers several incentives to encourage industry-university interactions: businesses are able to sponsor joint research projects with Stanford faculty and students, invite faculty to join their boards or act as consultants, offer internships to students and use the university's libraries. SRI International, a non-profit contract research institute, split off from Stanford University in 1970 and now employs more than 2,100 people. The institute has conducted research for over 90 private and non-profit businesses, and also licenses and commercializes the technology it develops with federal funds. Norman Winarsky, SRI's vice president of ventures, says its four spin-off companies that have gone public are now worth US$20 billion. The University of California (UC) has also forged enduring partnerships and collaborations with industry. The UC system, spread across 10 campuses, is the state's flagship higher education institute and is a powerful engine for job creation, says Steve Kay, dean of the division of biological sciences at UCSD. The university has “generated the pipeline of trained scientists and technologists that has really fed into the high-tech, the biotech, and now, more recently, the clean-tech explosions,” he says. A UCSD study published in February 2011 revealed that the 156 active UCSD-related companies are directly responsible for 18,140 jobs. The UC system also hosts four Gray Davis Institutes for Science and Innovation, each a collaboration between several campuses, that are purposed with accelerating technology transfer and increasing interactions between the state, UC and industry. They are the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). California industry also provides the most support for local academic R&D in the United States. During the 2009 fiscal year, industry-financed R&D expenditures at Californian universities and colleges totalled US$506 million, according to the NSF. Staying ahead Funding for higher education, however, has been harder to come by in the wake of the recent economic downturn. The UC system is facing financial challenges as a result of the state budget deficit. For the 2010 fiscal year, UC had a budget shortfall of US$1 billion, which it has tried to make up with faculty furloughs, tuition increases and programme cuts. On a more positive note, certain research avenues are just starting to grow. In 2004, voters in California passed Proposition 71, a US$3 billion bond issue to fund stem-cell research in the state. The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, a regulatory agency, allocates the funds. In 2010, as a result of those grants, five new stem-cell research facilities were dedicated at UC Davis, UC Los Angeles (UCLA), UC Irvine, Stanford University, and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. A sixth centre, the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, is under construction in San Diego and due to open in 2011 for collaborative stem-cell research between the Salk Institute, Scripps Institute, UCSD and Sanford-Burnham. The hope is that the research will eventually provide new opportunities to spin out companies focused on stem-cell therapies. California has also been hit hard with unemployment, which now exceeds 12 percent. The biomedical research industry, though, has not shed as many jobs as other high-tech sectors, according to the BayBio/CHI study. The biofuels industry is also one of the fastest growing in terms of job creation, says Gail Maderis, president and chief executive of BayBio. Agilent's Solomon says there are jobs available, but workers need to be flexible. For new recruits, the company looks for ‘T-shaped’ people — researchers who are highly skilled in one area but who can also communicate horizontally across fields. Winarsky of SRI adds that scientists working on innovative research have good job prospects: “They are high-premium people.” A question on many people's minds is how the state, strapped for funds, will deal with its budget crisis. Genentech's Jackson says she does not anticipate the corporate R&D tax credit being trimmed back. “So far the legislature has felt a compelling interest to keep those tax credits in place to continue to grow the industry,” she says. Pharmaceutical companies like Genentech take comfort in the fact that their products remain necessary, even in lean times. “We're in a flat growth spell right now, but the industry's pipeline is healthy,” Jackson says. “We anticipate continued job growth in the next decade.” California's history of innovation, from HP's inception to today's efforts in stem-cell research and solar technology, will provide a strong foundation for future growth.