From the west coast to the east coast, from academia to industry
I spent about a decade on the west coast completing my doctoral and post-doctoral training. Then it was time to explore the world beyond. So, I moved to New York City. It was not a planned move like when I moved from China to the US, but it wasn’t out of the blue either. It felt natural, like it was supposed to be my next step even though I hadn’t thought about it much before. I was drawn by curiosity to find out whether I would click with the city’s spirit, and it has been good so far.
In the other part of the move, I transitioned from academia to my first industry job. I joined PsychoGenics, Inc. (PGI), a preclinical contracted research organization with expertise in disorders of the central nervous system. PGI has been a partner for the NIH/NINDS Preclinical Screening Platform for Pain (PSPP) program since 2019. Our scientific team performs in vitro and in vivo research to support PSPP’s effort to identify non-opioid and non-addictive treatments for pain. I am one of the lead scientists on the team. It is a cool experience to use what I learned in my decades of training to work towards a cause to reduce human suffering, which I care deeply about.
Besides searching for treatments for general painful conditions, we place more interest in a few specific conditions, like migraine headache and chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN). When you spend some time in a discipline, say science, following the path chosen by heart, you may find that it comes back full circle and everything becomes connected looking back. From college to graduate school, now to PGI, I have always been working on some projects associated with CIPN without any deliberate intention. In college, I was a chemistry major studying how chemotherapeutic drugs kill both cancerous and normal cells. In graduate school, I tried to understand how a novel pain treatment relieved the pain from this neuropathy. In my current position, I provide interpretation for experiment results and sometimes directions for future research, both based on my combined knowledge from previous experience. Suffice to say, what I learned in college and graduate school has come in handy now.
Maybe moving from China to the west coast, then to the east coast, and moving from one phase of career to the next are similar in that. You may not know how each decision comes to be or how it will shape your life, but if you follow your heart in those decisions, everything will eventually make sense.