For Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows navigating their future career paths, Dr. Christa Heyward's journey so far is an inspiring reminder of how unconventional experiences can make someone a phenomenal pharmaceutical industry candidate.
She graciously let me interview her for this blog over an extended phone call. Our conversation meandered quite a bit, though I did start off posing the following questions:
- What attracted you to industry and how did you decide to pursue a career in industry?
- What are your current responsibilities as an Investigator at GSK?
- Are there key similarities and differences between working in industry and in academia?
- Has anything surprised you about working in industry?
- What were the experiences in your background that have been useful as you tackled your first job in industry?
- How can PhD students or postdocs prepare themselves for a position in industry?
- Any application or interview tips for PhDs who are interested in pursuing an industry career?
Read on to see how we tackled these questions and many more.
Catching up since graduate school
As the remaining snow fell from a Nor-easter that barreled up the east coast overnight, I spoke with Dr. Christa Heyward about her recent transition into a pharmaceutical industry position.
She’d made the transition only six months ago, and I was looking for a Ph.D. scientist with a fresh perspective. I was looking for someone with recent experience to share what it takes to successfully get a scientist job in industry.
We had reconnected several months prior, over a freezing outdoor lunch on South Street in Philadelphia. It had been over a decade since our overlapping time during grad school at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine (now Perelman School of Medicine).
We reminisced about our graduate school challenges. Upon hearing about her adventures since she earned her Ph.D., I quickly realized that Dr. Heyward’s story was unique, yet so relatable.
It was an honor to be privy to her candid stories and catch a glimpse of Dr. Heyward’s approach to life - how her industry job fits into her scientific career, which fits into the greater picture of her life.
A hands-on problem solver, in science and at home
After texting me the view of the winter wonderland outside her window, Dr. Heyward commented on the time and resources required to take care of a historic home.
Currently living in a house that had been in her family for multiple generations, she calmly recounted how she’d do the neverending repairs herself if not for her full-time job. Occupying her mind at the moment are two trees, in particular, leaning in the wind and threatening to come down on the house.
To say that she could take care of home maintenance may be an understatement. From a young age, she’d been an assistant for her plumber father and could get into the crawl spaces that he could not. She still kept her deceased father’s toolbox in the basement. So, if needed, she could solder her own pipes.
I could see how Dr. Heyward’s instinct to solve a problem with her own two hands translated to how she enjoyed her current responsibilities as an Investigator in Discovery at GSK. She described her job to be similar to her prior work in academia - that is, she is physically conducting her own experiments.
Professors (or academic Principal Investigators - PIs) typically no longer work at the lab bench. Instead, they have the responsibility - nay, pressure - to write grant applications to fund their science and staff. Senior managers and leaders in Discovery at large pharma companies who have many years of experience in drug development may similarly move beyond the bench.
In fact, Dr. Heyward relishes her current lab activities. She observes that her peer Ph.D. and postdoctoral-trained scientists at the company are doing great hands-on science.
These days, she’s designing experiments, buying reagents, and producing data. She’s learning to use new scientific tools or instrumentation almost every week. There’s software that she is learning to analyze data.
Being new to the pharmaceutical industry, Dr. Heyward was, from the beginning, in awe of having a wide range of sophisticated and necessary tools at her disposal to pursue research. “I don’t have to justify why I need to buy a reagent to the extent I needed to in academia!”
Making an impact on patients through Discovery science
In Discovery, scientists are experts in a wide range of specialties, such as cell biology and genetics. They may test hundreds of possible drug candidates to see if any might appropriately advance to the next stage of further drug development research. Given the knowledge they have on the biological mechanisms of diseases, Discovery scientists also conduct target identification, validation, and optimization.
These are not the same problems that academic scientists typically tend to solve. Their attention is focused on driving for greater depth of knowledge in a siloed area of expertise.
By contrast, industry scientists like Dr. Heyward have to cast a wide net in hopes that the molecules they work on will meet certain drug discovery milestones. Doing the right experiment could mean finding a new treatment for patients.
“It’s a mile wide and an inch deep,” she says, referring to the breadth of knowledge required in an industry position. She’s constantly reading up on various mechanisms for yet an additional project. All of this is done in hopes of making a direct impact on patient health, something she feels would have been beyond the realm of possibility had she stayed in academia.
“Letting the science lead” research and publications
When I asked Dr. Heyward how she determines which experiments to pursue, she responded that every company has a priority list of projects for Discovery scientists. When there’s a need, the company assigns someone to work on a particular project.
Just like in academic science, someone new to a project in the pharma industry will need to quickly get up to speed in the subject area. They need to figure out what’s the next piece of information that will benefit the project.
Dr. Heyward explained, “You do a literature review on the subject area, and you apply what you learned to the project. Then you do the experiments, get the data, and determine the next steps.”
Similar to those in academia, industry scientists like Dr. Heyward may need to spend time optimizing experiments - figuring out what went wrong and how to get the experiment to work properly. “It doesn’t happen overnight,” she says.
She has the freedom to pursue research questions that are directly linked to the project. Sometimes, when she hits a roadblock on the project, she’ll pivot and look at tangential scientific questions to pursue.
Her experiment’s results determine whether a biological mechanism is valid. Or, they provide evidence for decision-making on whether a project should continue or be stopped.
I asked about publications. Dr. Heyward emphasized that the company’s motto is “Let the science lead.” Therefore, within the constraints of intellectual property, the company encourages scientists to do publication-quality research and to establish a publication track record.
Subsistence on research grant funding
When Dr. Heyward defended her dissertation, she had not yet published her work in a scientific journal. The paper came out later, but she admitted feeling self-conscious about it. She feared that her lack of publications might not reflect positively on her scientific credibility.
That didn’t stand in her way though. She graduated with her Ph.D. from the Cell and Molecular Biology program at Penn (with prior bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Villanova and Duquesne University, respectively). She then went on to have a series of immunology postdoctoral fellowships at Cornell University in upstate New York.
Over about six years as a postdoctoral fellow, she applied her passion for science in the lab. She taught courses and mentored undergraduate and graduate students. Most importantly, she returned to live close to her parents and was able to see her teenage son graduate from high school and start college.
Dr. Heyward lamented that if she’d chosen a more hands-on PI (over how “cool” the project was) during graduate school, maybe she would have graduated with more publications. Serendipitously, she had such an ideal hands-on PI during one of her postdoctoral fellowship appointments.
Dr. Heyward raved that this mentor was incredibly energetic and productive. She was not just a talented scientist but also a quintessential role model for her all-female lab. This PI normalized time away from work. She left the lab regularly to take her two kids to doctor appointments. She spent time with her family. Yet incredulously, she also reviewed thick stacks of publications and summarized them for her lab to advise on the next steps for research projects.
As in most academic research labs, keeping the lights on and the research humming along require successful grant applications. Dr. Heyward and her postdoctoral fellowship mentor submitted eight grant applications in one year.
Unfortunately, they did not receive funding from a single one of those applications that year. It’s not surprising, given that in recent years, the overwhelming majority of NIH grant pay lines are under 20%, and indeed many are under 10%.
Saying goodbye to academia and the status quo
Reflecting on how disappointing it was for her mentor and role model to not receive research funding, Dr. Heyward remarked, “Not enough of the right people are succeeding.”
The grant review cycles can be brutal. The criticisms from reviewers may not always reflect their true biases. These could range from snobbery against an applicant’s institution or simply because the applicant is not part of that “old-boy network.”
Toward the end of her final postdoc, Dr. Heyward received an offer to stay at Cornell as a Research Scientist. At the time, though, she was devoting efforts to starting a biotech company with a friend. Plus, her son had graduated high school, so she was free from geographic restrictions to look for a new job outside of Ithaca, perhaps outside of academia.
Thus, she turned down the job offer because she felt that continuing in academia in that role would be a status quo that she didn’t want to maintain. She said, “I wanted to put myself in a position of discomfort.”
The PhD jack of all trades making ends meet
Little did she know of the rollercoaster ride she was about to embark on after making that decision. Because she turned down the job offer from Cornell, she moved in with her parents to save money.
Dr. Heyward and her co-founders were funding their biotech start-up with their own savings. The start-up worked on biomarkers, just around the same time when the Theranos scandal was coming to light. Thus, attracting early investors and grants was challenging.
“In hindsight, we founded the company with an idea, but we should have stayed in academia until the basic research had been done to prove that the technology worked,” she described as one of her learnings.
To make ends meet, she took on a variety of part-time positions, some in quick succession and others juggled simultaneously.
There was a stint of teaching a health class in a city middle school. She had previously taught classes at Penn and Cornell, but she recounted, “I realized very quickly that I did not want to teach 8th graders!”
After that, Dr. Heyward worked as a scientific manuscript editor. She contracted with a company that served non-native English clients who wanted to have the grammar in their manuscripts perfected for publication in English language journals.
When a friend with a property management company asked if she could be his assistant, Dr. Heyward offered to help. She tracked all the financials for the rentals managed by the company. She quickly learned to use the property management software.
“In the 8 or 9 months I was there, I learned all about city code and got incredible insights into real estate,” she said.
She also learned to communicate with investors and other players in the real estate industry.
“People in real estate operate completely differently than scientists!”
She admitted that it was sometimes incredibly frustrating to work with people in real estate. Their singular focus was on building wealth through real estate rather than playing any role in improving people’s lives.
Starting the job search for positions in pharma
Ever the person who desires to serve the greater good, Dr. Heyward started to consider how her skills and training could have an impact on people’s lives. She ran for public office in her hometown (but lost), and she also served on a Board of Directors for a local community college.
Unfortunately, her career thus far had not given her financial stability. “I was making so little money, it almost felt like I was unemployed!” she lamented.
In the meantime, her biotech start-up submitted (and re-submitted) grant applications. They finally received a grant of $2.5 million from the Department of Defense.
However, rather than continuing to run the company, Dr. Heyward and her co-founders decided to pivot. Their collaborators at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia were better positioned to expand the company’s work with the funding.
Thus, after handing over the reins of the company, Dr. Heyward decided to search for jobs in the pharmaceutical industry. Targeting the Philadelphia area, she initially interviewed for a position in process development.
I asked her whether she had known what process development scientists did. In fact, my husband, with his bachelor’s in chemical engineering, had worked in process development right after college. The focus is usually on optimizing the large-scale production of a pharmaceutical product. Important work, of course, but it didn’t seem to be a good fit for her advanced basic science skills.
“We were mid-pandemic, and I needed a job.” She further explained, “The job description called for cell culture experience, and I had over two decades of cell culture experience!”
Her approach to the job search was not wrong. After all, you do have to make sure that the words on your resume match the keywords on the job description.
“Your network is your net worth”
While waiting to hear back about the process development job and other applications, Dr. Heyward continued to network. She knew that pharma employees typically received referral bonuses if their recommended job candidate was hired. I confirmed this with my own experience.
A month later, Dr. Heyward heard from a former fellow Penn classmate, who was now working in Discovery at GSK. There was an opening for a Discovery scientist with innate immunity expertise. She immediately forwarded her resume to her friend, who shared it with the hiring manager.
The very next day, the hiring manager called Dr. Heyward to discuss the position. He then asked her to formally apply for the position online so that she would be in the applicant system. The interview process went well, and she started the job two months later.
Dr. Heyward credits her friend for this job, which was clearly a great match for her. From this experience, she emphasizes, “Your network is your net worth.” In addition, she says, “It’s all about who you know and who knows you.”
Pharma reignited a passion for being a scientist again
I asked her how it felt to start a new job in pharma. “Much of it feels like drinking from a fire hose,” she said. “There’s so much information. So many acronyms. There’s so much to know about the drug development process.” She adds, “Thankfully, I have a very supportive team to help me learn.”
During our lunch a few months ago, her enthusiasm for her job at GSK was infectious. It made me think that maybe I should take a peek at the company’s job openings.
“The environment of research here is more fun than I had anticipated,” Dr. Heyward admitted. “Plus, the immediacy of making an impact has made bench science in industry way more exciting than I expected.”
Advice for PhD scientists to get hired in the pharmaceutical industry
We talked about how Ph.D. graduates and postdoctoral fellows could increase their chances of getting hired. “It’s totally understandable that people outside of the industry are not aware of the different positions in pharma.”
She said, “Pharma will hire you for the experience that you have.” Dr. Heyward’s immunology experience was obviously her most marketable feature for the job. Without having that direct match with the job description, it would have been difficult to get hired.
But now that she’s in the industry, she can think of numerous ways to apply her other skills.
During interviews, she advises, “Be ready to talk about your research experience.” For her, she talked about the animal models she worked with and the immunology pathways she researched.
In addition, she also talked about her teaching and mentoring experiences at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Moreover, she shared her various leadership roles and examples of teamwork.
Most importantly, Dr. Heyward emphasizes that candidates will be very attractive if they show how they have successfully navigated interpersonal relationships. “Scientists might be brilliant in the lab, but oftentimes, they’re not so good at working with other people.” In those cases, they’re less likely to succeed in the team-oriented pharma setting.
Looking into the future
Any company that hires Dr. Heyward gains not just her research prowess but her unique set of leadership skills and passion for doing good. But I wondered: was she actually using the leadership skills she acquired during her days leading Equity and Access in student government in this job? Maybe not right now.
Eventually, though, she may explore leadership roles, such as hiring entry-level scientists or managing a team of scientists. She may even consider positions in other functions. “The immediate next step is to establish myself as someone who is generating great data. When you do great science, you increase your visibility in the industry.”
She recognizes that being in industry means that you can keep your ears to the ground to hear about positions as they open up. After all, the company knows you now. And you can decide how your skillset can be molded to transition you into a different job.
Balancing science and financial security
Toward the end of our conversation, Dr. Heyward and I discussed our mutual angst about the billions of pounds of discarded or unwanted clothes from the US and other developed countries that end up as mountains of textiles in third-world countries.
She commented that clothing and shoes made from recycled materials are currently at prices inaccessible for the majority of consumers. Therefore, they will not become the mainstream staple of fashion and solve our textile pollution problem.
Only now that she has a job in industry is she earning an income that allows her to consider making important consumer decisions to support these types of products.
Of course, Dr. Heyward cited a passion for science and having an impact on the drug development process as the impetus for taking a job in the pharma industry. However, we both admit that another important reason is that these jobs have compensations that are commensurate with the education and training that Ph.D. scientists have.
Unless you are independently wealthy, job decisions undoubtedly have to take into consideration the life that we want to live and/or how we want to care for our families.
Dr. Heyward is now financially able to help care for her grandparents’ aging house, among other priorities in her life. She can afford to hire a tree service for those two unruly trees in her backyard that are threatening to crush the house this winter.
Her story is a reflection of how doing science to benefit patients can be rewarding both from the societal as well as personal perspectives.
Last notes
Dr. Heyward’s immense enthusiasm yet practical perspective on her research job at GSK was a refreshing reminder of the immense impact that our career choices have on our lives.
Her story is also a reminder that Ph.D. scientists take a variety of paths to get into a career in industry. There is no ideal path, and sometimes there are detours or sideroads to explore. But all of those experiences add up and can enrich the story that we use to market ourselves as valuable job candidates.
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are of the author and interviewee and not of their employers.