I think we will go ahead and start. Thank you, everybody, for coming. This is our professional development workshop on alternate career paths. And we are very lucky to have outstanding speakers here today. So I'm just going to do a brief introduction for all four of them, and then we will start. The way the panel is going to work, we're going to have each of our speakers present a little bit about their career path and their journey. And then at the closing of all of their talks, we will open for questions. So please make sure that you write down your questions or remember your questions, because we'll have the question and answer at the end. So I'll start here at the far end. We have Dr. Raymond Sosio. He is an endocrinologist at Penn Metabolic Medicine Clinic and an adjunct assistant professor of medicine at University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Dr. Sosio has, throughout his career, been studying transcriptional pathways important in hepatic lipid and cholesterol hemiostasis. And he's also been involved in education of undergraduates, medical, and graduate students. Next we have Dr. Andres Moraitis, and he is an endocrinologist and a senior medical director at Corcept Therapeutics in California. And prior to working at Corcept, he was an assistant professor of endocrinology at University of Michigan Medical School. Dr. Moraitis engaged in local, national, and international public speaking, and his research interests included Cushing syndrome, adrenal tumors, adrenal insufficiency, and genetic causes that cause adrenal and pituitary tumors. Next is Dr. Latha Malayandi. She is a scientific review officer at National Institute of Health Center for Scientific Review. Dr. Malayandi received her Ph.D. in pharmacology from University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. And before joining her CSR, she was an associate professor of anatomy at Midwestern University near Chicago, Illinois, where she directed courses for medical students, dental and physician assistants, and her research program focused on the role of muscarinic signaling in adrenal cortex. And last but not least, we have Dr. Timothy Beardsley, who is one of the Endocrine Society staff, and he's an executive director in publication department, started seven years ago, and has been instrumental in launching the Journal of Endocrine Society. Dr. Beardsley earned his Master of Arts and Ph.D. in zoology from University of Oxford in United Kingdom. So I'm going to open the mic, and we'll have Dr. Sosio come in first, and we'll follow then with speakers. Thank you. All right, thanks, everyone. Looking forward to a good discussion in this session, and I get to lead it off, telling you about my career path to government with the FDA. I get to go first. It's not a contest, but I think this will be the best alternative career path, but you can be the judge of that at the end. So to start out with my career trajectory, Katja introduced me with my old position, where we get to at the end here, but I was pretty much on a very standard physician scientist career path, doing a combined degree, a short track residency, a subspecialty, a long time as a postdoc and instructor, finally getting a tenure track, a junior faculty job. And then I took a little bit of a left turn, but it's a right turn on the slide, in 2021, and left academia to go work for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, where I'm a medical officer at the FDA. So how to make sense of this, well, if you put it on a map, I pretty much was just moving down interstate 95, going further south. I guess I'll retire when I get to Florida. But in reality, you look at the timing here, and it was 2021 in the peak of the coronavirus pandemic when I made this change. It wasn't just me, there was a name for this. It was the great resignation. People started evaluating their careers and lives and making changes. So I first started looking at other positions. I was about, as you can see, about four years into my faculty position. I was running a basic research lab. I had a startup package I was supposed to last five years. Getting towards the end of that, I didn't have an R01 yet. The institution was telling me that, how would they support me if I didn't? So I had an R01 in review, but I started looking at other jobs, and the FDA job was really intriguing to me. As it turned out, the R01 got funded, and I still decided to move to FDA. And so why did I do that? What's it like there? So I'll take you very quickly to my little compare and contrast between my experience in the past two years at the FDA versus what I was dealing with in academia before that. I'll start out with just the elephant in the room here, which is the hours, the work-life balance, the opportunity to telework. Even before the pandemic, this was two days a week in person and three telework. Right now, it's only one in person. It's 40 hours a week, and it's legit 40 hours a week. I know because it's the government. I have to fill out a time card and account for my hours. So I know it's 40 hours, but I have a wonderful work-life balance and lots of time and no expectation for evenings, weekends, and all the things that were expected in academia. So the workload is very reasonable and well-defined. Those of you in academia know that things just keep getting piled on you, like one feather at a time, until you have more than you can possibly do. Your job responsibilities in the government are well-defined. In FDA, they want to make sure that I have enough time to do a thorough review to make sure that drugs are safe and effective for the American people. So they definitely monitor everyone's workload to make sure everyone has the time to do thorough work. I didn't know anything about regulation. I don't think any of us do in academia. It's kind of a black box what happens in regulation, but there's excellent training and professional development to get you up to speed in the regulatory science. We're all, or most of us, are endocrinologists, so you know it's not a very high-paying specialty, but the salary that was offered at FDA is competitive to what I would make as an academic endocrinologist. I think it was actually a little bit more, but the government has so many ethics and conflict of interest stuff, I couldn't do any side consulting and things like that, so it probably evened out. It's a very team-focused job. I only have to worry about the clinical aspects of the review, but then there are chemists, there are pharmacologists, there are statisticians who look at all the other aspects of it. And so you're a subject area expert, you have to be good at what you do, but there are other folks who are good that you collaborate with to look at the other aspects of things. I guess FDA has a reputation for being very rigorous and thorough and detailed and being the gold standard. So yeah, if something gets approved, the evidence is definitely there. And I won't contrast that with the level of evidence in a lot of the basic science that I was doing before. This is one of the negatives, but it could be a positive for some people, but there's definitely a lot of structure. There are deadlines, everything you do has to go up the chain of supervisors. It's a little bit more hierarchical than what I was used to in academia. But with that, there's an opportunity to move up that ladder into leadership positions if you want to, though plenty of people stay on for many years as just a primary reviewer because it's a pretty sweet gig. Of course, this one I put in parentheses because I'm probably not supposed to mention this, but there is a little bit of a revolving door between the regulators and the regulated where people go from FDA to sometimes higher paying jobs in industry and back and forth. And so the training experience you get at FDA will make you a very attractive candidate to industry if you go that route. But most people I see at FDA are not looking to do that. They really believe in the mission of getting safe and effective drugs to the American people. They're not in it for themselves. They're real public servants, and this makes them real great colleagues, I've found. The work is really diverse. I've got dozens of drugs with all sorts of mechanisms of actions, a lot of interesting science. Even when the science isn't very interesting, often it raises interesting regulatory issues, which I thought would be pretty boring, but it turns out they're not. And of course, it's highly impactful. So I'm on the team that reviews drugs for lipids and obesity. So a lot of the sessions I've attended at this meeting are products that I'm reviewing and I'm seeing the pharma people describing data and studies for things that we told them to do because this is what you have to do to get approved. And there are, what, six or seven clinical reviewers, so any investigational drug that's going into a human for lipids or obesity or is going to be approved for those indications is going through one of the seven of us. So it's just hugely, hugely impactful. Oh yeah, so on the right of the slide, that's the hierarchical aspect, so that's from my team all the way up to the division in the organization. It looks like I've already taken a bit too much time, so I'm going to not go into a lot of detail of what the day-to-day activities of my job are. Suffice to say, we review drugs throughout their whole life cycle, from the first in humans through phase one, two, and three, the approval of the NDAs or the new drug applications or biological license applications, and then all the post-marketing surveillance that comes after that. We meet with each other, we meet with the sponsors, we meet with advisory committees, we have grand rounds, we invite academic speakers to come in. In a lot of ways, it's very similar to what I was doing in academia. You can come to meetings like the Endocrine Society, where I am now. I'll throw out the last caveat, though, that compared to academia, a lot of the review work is a bit more solitary. It's a lot of time sitting at your computer, really delving into the data and writing reports, and not the face-to-face you get in clinical medicine or even in the research that I was doing. I don't think that suits everyone, but if that kind of suits your personality, where you can really focus and delve into some really interesting stuff, that appealed to me. What I've probably missed the most in academia is my students and trainees. I haven't had the opportunity to do much of that at FDA, because I guess I've been the trainee as I've learned how to do it. With that, I know not everyone here is a clinician. Like I mentioned, there's a team. There's the non-clinical reviewers. These are the basic scientists who review the in vitro cell and animal data, the pre-clinical data for the drugs. I talk to the non-clinical team about what they look for, usually a Ph.D. and a couple years of post-doc, and using relevant animal models is a plus. Clinical pharmacology team, those are usually grad students or pharmacology Ph.D.s or pharmacists, also often with some research experience. And then there's chemistry, statistics, informatics, FDA's trying to incorporate big data, real world data into reviews, so that there are plenty of opportunities, and FDA.gov backslash jobs to take a look, and I'll be glad to answer more questions in the Q&A or talk individually afterwards, but for now, I will turn it over to the next speakers. So I just put Andreas up? Okay. Good afternoon, everyone. It's good to see you. I mean, it's, I think, the last session of the day, so I'm glad that I see so many people here. Out of curiosity, can I ask how many of you are physicians here? Can you? Oh. Look at this. That's great, because I just tried to see, you know, if I, you know, what has to be focusing on in presentation. I would like to say that usually when, you know, from the industry I interact with the FDA, we usually are across the table from them. It's the first time actually I'm sitting next to someone from the FDA, but it's really cool, by the way, yeah. It's a unique experience, but I'm glad I, you know, we can do that. So I would like just to briefly, you know, walk you through my journey. I was born and raised in Greece, so I moved to the United States 20 years ago, and although I had completed my training, you know, in Greece, I had to do everything again here. You know, that's how it works. And although the plan was to stay here only for a few years to do my, complete my endocrine training and go back, you know, you never know. Life is full of surprises, so I ended up, you know, 20 years later, you know, I'm still here. My focus always has been, you know, pituitary and adrenal abnormalities, tumors. I worked for years at the NIH working on the genetics and also doing clinical research and adrenal tumors and pituitary tumors. Cushing's has been my passion since day one, so even when I left the NIH and I moved to the University of Michigan just to start seeing something non-pituitary, you know, non-adrenal, for some reason, you know, I ended up again seeing all the Cushing's patients in the Michigan area in North Ohio, actually. I took over the position of a guy who was seeing patients with Cushing's for 30 years, so within a night, or overnight, I inherited like 45 patients with Cushing's, so that was like a full-time job, you know, at the time. And then what I, this is something that, you know, happens a lot, you know, oftentimes you interact with the industry, you know, in academia, and I was, you know, consultant for the company that I currently work, and I was fascinated with, you know, with the drug they have, so for me, it was not so difficult, the transition to move to the industry, because even now, you know, after 10 years being in the same company, I continue to do, to work in patients with Cushing's syndrome and develop drugs for patients with Cushing's syndrome, so my career has been like Cushing's, you know, oriented from day one. At the beginning, when I made the transition, I, you know, I was hesitating, you know, because it was something, you know, an abrupt change for me. That's why, you know, although I moved to the industry, I continue to see patients, to have a clinic on the side, but over time, I can tell you, it's, you cannot have two jobs, you know, you really have to peak, and I moved full-time to industry, and I, right now, I develop, you know, medications for patients with Cushing's syndrome. That's what I do exclusively. Now, since my focus is drug development, you know, I will talk about that, but I would like to, you know, bring to your attention that there are so, so many opportunities in industry, you know, so not just for physicians, but also for non-physicians, and although as physicians, you think that you continue to involve in the development, you like, you know, because of your medical background, actually, you can do anything you want. You have no idea how many physicians we have that they don't involve, they're not involved in clinical development, in developing medication. They do medical writing, they organize the studies, they do the logistics, the clinical operations, they work exclusively with attorneys, you know, for patents, which is, I can tell you, it's a very important aspect in an issue in a company. I'm not sure if you're aware, but most of the companies, they spend 10 to 20 percent of the revenues to secure intellectual property for their products, because that protects the exclusivity of their medication for many years. So that's why, and that was, I think, a thing that I was, I'm going back, all the publications that I have done, if somebody had told me, oh, you know what, before you publish something, think if there is something that is patentable, something that you can protect intellectual property, my life would be a lot different right now. That's why, if I can give you an advice right now, because, you know, if you're involved in research, before you publish anything, just think if what you're publishing, it's novel, it's something that can help, it could lead to an indication, a new pathway, because that can actually be extremely helpful for you. It can provide the funding that you need to, for research in your institution or jump to the industry. Somebody from the, oh, I like your idea, I want to buy your idea, and you want to join so I can fund this so you can, you know, take it to the final level. In research, so in the pharmaceutical company, you can also, as a chemist, for example, you can work with manufacturing, how to make the medication, right, find the right formulation, evaluate the pharmacokinetics, if you're a pharmacologist, assess the toxicology of the drug, see if the drug is safe to be used. So there are so many steps that need to be completed before you can get to the human trials. You need to make sure that the drug is safe in, you know, preclinical models, you want to make sure that the drug has no toxicity that, you know, you can predict based on, you know, specific preclinical models. And once you pass all these tests, that all these tests are evaluated by the FDA, you know, every department that you have in a company, there is another department at the FDA who confirms your findings. They double and triple check everything, because that's what the FDA is concerned about. They want to make sure that whatever you have, you bring to the clinical trials, it's safe. They don't care so much about efficacy, it's the safety that is, and that's why it's very important. And you cannot ignore the FDA. The FDA is, although I, you know, I was joking in the beginning, we are partners of that, because if you, if we cannot, if I cannot convince the FDA that what I'm doing is safe and potentially effective, we are not going anywhere with that. So that's why I always see them as allies, not as, you know, competitors or enemies. Now, once you have your drug, then you can move to the next level, which usually it's studies in healthy volunteers, in most of the products. And studies in healthy volunteers are very easy to recruit, because believe it or not, there are people that they actually, they participate in phase one, clinical trial two, they do it for a living. I mean, I was surprised, I was shocked, you know, how easily, you know, healthy people say, anyhow, you want to try this medication, right? It's surprising, but I can tell you, we've never had, and no company has ever had a problem recruiting phase one studies to test, you know, for the first time new compounds. And then once you pass that test, you know, see if your drug is, you know, is absorbed, you get the levels that you need, and you can have multiple specialties, you know, helping you. You need your pharmacologist to help you with the pharmacokinetic analysis. You need your chemist to make sure that, you know, the formulation works. You need support, you know, to build the study. Because it's not that I invite five people of you, oh, you would like to try this medication so I can do a study. It's a whole process that you need to follow. You need to file, to file, like, you know, to apply to the FDA first, you know, I'm planning to, I would like to use this new medication in, you know, in healthy subjects. Do you approve that? And the FDA, we're going to do all this work. They're going to look all of the data, they double and triple check everything. And if they have questions, they say, no, you cannot do it. So you have to convince them that it is safe to do this. And once you do this, then you start your studies. And to set up, like, even a study, it's so painful. You have to build the protocol, right? And you have to follow the protocol. You cannot say, oh, I forgot to do this. I can do it. You have to change your protocol to be able to even add, like, a simple blood test in any analysis, you know, you want to do. And once you complete that and you have an idea about your medication, then you proceed to phase two studies. And the phase two studies, you have, it's the first time that usually you test your medication in patients. And that's when you start, what you're trying to learn in this, at this stage of development, you try to see whether the drug is safe in the particular patient population that you want to pursue an indication in the future, but also find what's the right dose, how you should be titrating the medication, are there any safety issues that you didn't observe in your healthy volunteers. So these are all these questions that you need to get. And once you finish this, then you have a meeting with the FDA and you say, this is what I observed, right? I tested my medication in healthy volunteers. I have the findings. I tested my medication in patients with indication I would like to pursue. And then you start negotiation with the FDA for your phase three studies, because your phase three studies are the studies that would lead to the approval of the drug, assuming that they're, you know, they're successful. Now to get to that level, right, you have, first of all, to have a medication, right? So you need, most of the companies, they have a pipeline. So, and every time they go back and say, okay, let's see what's the right candidate for this. And they select the medication and they go through the whole process, make sure that they can formulate the medication in a way that, you know, it can be absorbed and used in humans. When it's related with the genetic disease, oftentimes, as you know, that's the, you know, brand new thing right now, going after diseases with genetic abnormality and try to either silence genes or replacing, you know, abnormal genes. Going after, you know, replacing proteins that are deficient, hormonal replacements, for example. And, but at the same time, as you do this, you can also think, okay, what if you have like a disease and your medication, the way it works, you need something to, for example, to predict which patients will be responding or not. So, you can build, you can work on diagnostic on the same, diagnostic tests at the same time. Tests that could help you select the right patients for a particular, you know, for your medication, see which are the patients that will be responding to your treatment or patients, you know, if there is a market that can help you titrate your medication, select the right dose to use. And then once you go through all this process and everything is fine, it is approved, you don't stop there. Even after the approval of the medication, you continue to evaluate the safety of your medication. That's actually, there is a separate branch in the industry, the safety group, the pharmacovigilance, that even after the approval, the FDA mandates to continue monitor for adverse events, especially serious adverse events, and report every year all the findings to the FDA. Because oftentimes, when you test the medication in a larger number of patients, you come across adverse events or safety, or even efficacy, things that you didn't pick up in your pivotal trial, the phase three trial, because the phase three trials are usually a lot smaller. It's, you know, if you test a medication in 100 patients, right, you observe something, but I bet you if you, you know, post-marketing, you review the safety or the efficacy in 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000 patients, I'm sure you always find something that you missed in your smaller earlier studies. And then after the phase three studies and the approval, there's always the option to do what we call the phase four studies. And the phase four studies is you try to either expand the label of a medication or even start considering different indication, additional indications for the medication. And that's, I think, something that is of an extreme interest to the industry, because oftentimes, even when, you know, some people concern, oh, this is an adverse event of this medication, the way that we should be approaching this, and as physicians, because you do use medications a lot, right, an adverse event of a medication could be an indication for another patient population, right? I'll give you the example of the medication that, you know, I use. Mifepristin is the medication that my company's the first approved medication. As you know, Mifepristin was approved as the abortion pill, right? But then they found out that if you use it in higher doses, it targets the glucocorticoid receptors. So suddenly, it has been used like off-label for years to treat patients with severe Cushing's. No, nobody, you know, decided to do anything. After 20 years, you know, we decided to do formally a study to evaluate the medication. It was the first drug that approved in Cushing's. Or another example, the aspirin, right, was developed as an inflammatory medication, and then they found out that it's causing bleeding, right? And now it's used, you know, to prevent strokes and heart attacks in patients with cardiovascular risk. That's why I keep always an open mind when you do see, because when you see patients, in your experience, you can identify, detect things that, you know, nobody else has the option to do, because you are in with the patients. You do see things that other people don't. And even when companies conduct, you know, studies, they cannot collect all the data that you can see. You know, they have pre-specified forms that we need to complete. I saw this, this, this. But there are things that are not included, which is something that you observe. So this observation could help you, you know, maybe, you know, discover something that might lead to another indication, to a new use of the drug, or, you know, modifying the existing drug to, you know, to target a different disease. So just keep that in mind, because you have no idea how many opportunities are out there. And oftentimes, what I do when I speak with physicians, my investigators in the studies, I ask all these questions, all the questions that I cannot capture in a protocol. And that has been enormously, enormously helpful. That's all I have. Thank you. Okay. Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. For those of you that were at the early career forum earlier this week, I apologize. This is a similar spiel that I gave there. So I am an SRO, Scientific Review Officer, at CSR, where our primary mission is in peer review. So at CSR, there are 250 SROs like myself, and we collectively manage the peer review of nearly 66,000 grant applications that come to the NIH every year, which is why there's so many of us. So you might ask, what exactly does an SRO do? And this is not at all a dumb question, something I had to learn myself as I was applying for this job. So we're the designated federal officials that ensure high-quality peer review in order to identify the most impactful science. So for a set of applications, you recruit scientists with appropriate expertise. You train reviewers to follow review criteria. You run the review meetings to ensure that policies and procedures are followed, and then you summarize the discussion to sort of capture the score-driving factors that are going to be helpful to those who ultimately make the funding decisions. So let me tell you a little bit about my sort of unconventional pathway to becoming an SRO, although I have to say there's no conventional pathway because multiple roads lead to CSR. So when I was at the University of Pittsburgh, you know, many of my peers were aiming for research careers either in academia or industry, and I wasn't entirely sure that I wanted to be an R01 researcher. So my last year in graduate school, I did some adjunct teaching, and I loved it. So instead of doing a traditional postdoc, I went straight into a teaching position at a small regional university in South Carolina. But I also established an NSF-funded research program where I primarily trained undergraduates who were brand new to wet bench research. Now, granted, I was at a very small place with very limited resources, so I was not only the PI of the lab, but I was the lab manager, the technician, the postdoc. I did it all. So inevitably, I burned out after a few years. I then transitioned to a health sciences university here in the Chicago area where I taught medical and graduate students, and I also did some research that was funded in part by R15 grants. And then, you know, fast forward a few years, the pandemic hits, research comes to a screeching halt, I'm lecturing on Zoom to a bunch of blank windows, and, you know, teaching was no longer fulfilling. So like Dr. Socio said, I was part of the, you know, the great resignation where I started thinking, you know, what else could I do? And, you know, I considered the federal positions that came across this job at CSR, and it was very enticing, but, you know, I had convinced myself that, you know, they were really looking for somebody who was a prominent R01-funded researcher. Why would they consider somebody like me who had spent their time in teaching institutions? Well, I'm happy to say I was wrong, and I think, you know, some of my experiences not only helped me get this job, but also helped me feel comfortable in it. So, you know, let me tell you a little bit about what an SRO career can offer. So first of all, you have a major impact on science by ensuring that peer review proceeds in a fair and objective way. You know, CSR sees the full range of science. So from basic research to social science, behavioral science, clinical science, et cetera. So you really have the opportunity to learn outside of your expertise. For example, I run a basic science study section on endocrinology and metabolism, but I've also run specialized meetings focused on sex and gender differences or nutrition science or even primate research, and I've never worked with primates. Collegiality is key. It's very important. So, you know, all of us SROs do our jobs independently, but there's an extremely supportive network of colleagues, you know, and that collegiality also extends to the scientific community. You know, just because you no longer do research does not make you a less important player in science. You're well respected by the community. I've networked with a lot of people at scientific meetings like ENDO this week, although some of those people want to complain to or at me about the review of their grant applications. There's also the potential for career advancement, right? So eventually you might want to become a review branch chief or a referral officer or even outside CSR, people move on to become program officers within the NIH. And as Dr. Socio said, really good work-life balance, okay, you know, compared to academia. All of our tasks fall into three cycles per year and everything has to get wrapped up at the end of each cycle, but I don't want to give you the impression that things are boring or predictable because unexpected things always come up. You do have to problem solve and you have to manage your expectations accordingly. The nice thing about CSR is during the pandemic we were able to carry out all of our review meetings virtually without skipping a beat. So we do have very flexible work schedules. In fact, many of us were hired from all across the country. I live in the Chicago area. I did not have to relocate to the D.C. region. As federal employees, our benefits are excellent. We go by the general schedule or GS pay scale and it is very competitive compared to academia. So in terms of applying for these types of positions, I didn't fully appreciate how different the federal job application process is. So the first thing you have to do is you have to apply through the website USAJOBS.gov. The second thing is you fill out a questionnaire that sort of assesses your qualifications, but it can be a little tricky because the questionnaire isn't going to ask you about your job running a lab as a professor, but instead it might ask questions about your experience distributing competitive research funds. So for example, in my prior position, I chaired a committee that awarded small research grants to biomedical faculty. So the important thing is to think broadly about these questions and be honest, but don't sell yourself short. And then the last thing is that your application will undergo two steps of approvals. The first is with HR who checks your eligibility, and then your application gets referred to a hiring manager who may then set up an interview. So in terms of what are we looking for in good SRO candidates, and I think first and foremost is prior experience in independent research, and this doesn't have to be necessarily experienced as a faculty member, but could also include, you know, your experience as an industry scientist or a research administrator, for example, in grants management. You know, the questionnaire is going to assess your knowledge of NIH research, specifically can you identify gaps in scientific fields? And if you run your own lab, you do this routinely by reading the primary literature and identifying questions to pursue. The questionnaire might also ask about your knowledge of peer review. So if you have the experience writing grant applications, you understand how you put them together. If you've been awarded a grant application, you understand how they're managed. SROs lead a group of expert scientists, so leadership experience is really important, and given that you talk to a lot of groups of people, program officers, applicants, reviewers, strong communication skills are necessary. So what I'd like to leave you with is just, you know, a few aspects of the job that I love, what drew me to it. And first and foremost is, you know, at CSR, our primary focus is on review integrity and really creating sort of an equitable playing field for all applicants, and that's a common value that resonates amongst all my colleagues. We take that very seriously. The other thing is that because what we do is peer review, CSR is really at the forefront of innovations with respect to peer review, from simplifying review criteria to implementing trainings on bias awareness or review integrity to increasing diversity on panels. So that's something we're really trying to solve. And then lastly, what I'd say is with respect to training, you know, shifting from academia to this job was a very steep learning curve. You know, I was worried that I'd have to know every last policy and procedure right away, and that's not the case. You have extensive training because they don't want to see you fail. And sometimes that training can seem really overwhelming, but I think that if I had as much training before I gave my first lecture in the classroom, I would have been a far better educator. So I'm happy that my agency was really able to, you know, to invest in my success. And as Ray mentioned, you know, if I were to say what's the one thing that I miss about being in academia, obviously not writing grant applications or papers, I do miss working with students, but I have to say the one thing that I miss the most is probably physically doing research. You know, I was at the bench a lot, so there's nothing like holding up my pad and doing some ELISA assays or sitting at a microscope and doing live cell imaging and watching fluorescent changes on the screen. So that's the sort of things that I miss the most, but, you know, I'm very happy in this position and absolutely no regrets about making the move. And the one thing I'd like to say is in terms of, you know, training for this, there's no pathway or internship that one could do to sort of get a glimpse of this job. You know, if you were in intramural research at the NIH, they do have what's called a detail-y position, so it's like a short three-month sort of stint where you could be an SRO and see what that's like. But I think the closest thing we have is the early career reviewer program, which you might have heard of. So for those of you transitioning from a postdoc or fellowship into your first faculty position, you know, if you haven't gotten that big grant yet, like an R01, it's a, you know, a one-time you participate as a reviewer on one of our panels. You get a very small assignment, but it really gives you an idea of how peer review works at the NIH and also gives you, you know, hints on how to write better grant applications. So if you have any questions about that, I'm happy to answer it, and I even have some materials with me I can pass on to you. Okay? Thank you. So hello, everyone. Thanks for staying. And thank you, Katya, and thank you for the organizers, the forces behind the session for inviting me to be here. I have to say, though, that I think the path of my career has been unusual. And I'm really not at all sure that it has many lessons that can be generalized that are going to be useful to you today. Things are more formal now than when I started out. And what's more, the first part of my story was in England, where the rules were different then, and maybe they still are. But since I was asked, here goes. For my undergraduate degree, I read zoology at Oxford University. And I had the chance afterwards to work for a DPhil in the animal behavior department under David McFarland. Now, about the DPhil thing, in case you are wondering, I have a piece of paper somewhere, if I can find it, that testifies that a DPhil is, to all intents and purposes, the same as a PhD at an American university. But this is Oxford. Oxford has to cultivate the mystique, the Oxford mystique, and make sure everybody recognizes that they're a bit special. So they don't call it a PhD. They call it a DPhil, but it amounts to the same thing. So I did my DPhil in the animal behavior department under David McFarland. I did lab studies in skinner boxes with Barbary doves for a thesis entitled Decision Making in Animals with Special Reference to Learning and Optimal Use of Time and Energy Budgets. So this was an attempt to bridge a gap between what's called motivational control systems analysis, pioneered by Professor McFarland, and optimal foraging theory. So I had then, and I still have, a lot of reservations about that approach to studying animal behavior. There are many unknown constraints. And it's not a complete waste of time, but some of the conclusions about evolution must be very limited. Perhaps more important than those reservations about the scientific approach, acquiring data in that lab was painfully slow. We had two skinner boxes. And two skinner boxes, you can probably guess it takes a long time to get enough data to make any real conclusions about how these animals are deciding what to do. So after I'd done enough experiments to secure a degree, I decided I wanted to get out of that line of work. I did do some experiments funded by the European Union for a while on preferences of domestic hens, cage preferences, domestic hens aimed at improving animal welfare. And I published a paper on that with Marion Stamp Dawkins. But in the meantime, whilst doing these experiments, I found something that I enjoyed a lot more. When I felt poor, which was quite often, I would go to the zoology department library and peruse recent issues of journals, looking for research reports to write up for a news brief for New Scientist magazine. Still going, New Scientist, weekly, very good. I would send three 500-word pieces to New Scientist. And they would send me checks. And I really liked that. I also wrote a feature about some aspects of animal behavior research. And to my surprise, they put it on the cover and they sent me a bigger check. I liked that even more. So I enjoyed writing for non-specialists. And I admit, the gratification of seeing my name in print in New Scientist, people reading it all over the country, was quite pleasing. Because that took about 10 days to two weeks, whereas the experiments with the doves took months or years. Someone pointed me to an ad in Nature for a news writer in the London office. John Maddox, the long-term editor of Nature, later Sir John Maddox, invited me to an interview. He offered me a part-time position, saying he could make it full-time only after I'd completed the DPhil. So I did. And here is Sir John, looking much as I remember him. He kept his word. So at this time, I was reading about writing, generally, and news writing specifically, as well as reading in science very broadly. I remember books by Fowler and Fowler, the King's English, and something by Harold Evans. He was an English newspaper editor of note about newspaper writing. Later, Strunk and White and others. You probably have seen some of these. I'm sure you know about Strunk and White. These are all good books. Soon, I was writing one or two items in the news pages of Nature most weeks, helping with the editing of news and views articles. I'd go to press conferences, join in some of the editorial meetings about what papers they were gonna publish, met scientists who thought they had something that Nature ought to know about. John taught me about his rules of journalism. I remember one time he disapproved when I showed a draft of a story I'd written to a source. He didn't think we should be doing that. On Monday evenings, John would bash out his editorials on a manual typewriter, and I'd sometimes be asked to go with him to the typesetter's shop, where we'd paste out the pages, read them through, make corrections, then go to press, and that would be in that week's Nature, the editorials at the front of Nature that week. After a year of this, John offered me the chance to work in the Washington office, and there I did the same sort of work, but graduated to writing occasional editorials, and I admit I enjoyed the status that reporters in that town seemed to enjoy, more, I think, than they enjoyed in London. So in hindsight, I was pretty green about how Washington worked, but I learned a lot from the head of the bureau, Stephen Budiansky, and I also met reporters and editors at Science and other publications, Chronicle of Higher Education, that were on the same sort of beat in Washington education and science press conferences. I traveled a lot, met noted researchers and state persons of science all over the United States, and outside the United States. After about 18 months, my time in Washington was up, but London didn't hold much appeal. Fortunately, the editor of Scientific American, Jonathan Peel, was looking to have somebody be a Washington bureau, and gave me that job. So I was there for 13 years, initially writing short items in the front of Scientific American, but later commissioning and editing the full-length articles that make up the bulk of the magazine. These are drafted by scientists, but rewritten by the editors, extensively rewritten, I might say. I remember one of the editors devised an index to quantify how much editing had been done, and the index was the maximum number of words, consecutively, that were in the same sequence in the original article submitted, and as they finally appeared in print. And the number for some of these articles was running about eight, so you can gather from that how much rewriting was done. They were extensively rewritten. I learned about best practices for writing and editing a monthly magazine, and if you're publishing, you have to learn about copyright, you have to learn about libel law. It was never dull, and sometimes it was downright thought-provoking. I think the most thought-provoking day there was one day when Jim Watson, yes, that Jim Watson, called me and threatened to sue me and Scientific American if we published something that we got a hold of that he didn't want us to publish. So I traveled quite a bit. Among other adventures, I rode a NOAA Hurricane Hunter aircraft inside Hurricane Dennis for Taos, stayed at an ionospheric research lab in Greenland. This was more fun than experiments with doves, I can tell you. One author I'd worked with closely on a feature was the CEO of Human Genome Sciences, that's Bill Haseltine. He offered me a job as senior writer at that company, complete with stock options. So Haseltine was quite a well-known figure at the time. He'd been on the cover of Time magazine with Craig Venter, billed as one of the Gene Kings. He said he was looking for someone to improve the writing of his company's scientists, as well as his own writing. So I took that job. I was with HGS there only for a couple of years. It was fascinating to be at a biotech startup, and I got on well with the people there, including Bill, actually. But I soon realized that, unlike in my previous job, my writing and editing were not really there to help tell the unvarnished truth. Rather, they were there to apply thick layers of varnish to the truth, presenting the company's efforts in the best possible light. I did edit some papers, wrote one paper with some of the company's scientists, but the process was not satisfying because during the writing and editing of the paper, it was all about leaving out what we could get away with leaving out, unless the editor insisted on things. The company didn't want to, the company wanted to pose as being very strong in this field, but it didn't actually want to give away any more details than it had to. So it was a sort of uncomfortable backward negotiation where we weren't trying to tell the story, we were trying to get away with telling it as little as possible. Some of the writing was just puff pieces about Bill and what a great person he was. I didn't like writing that. Soon, clinical trial results and advances elsewhere made it clear that HGS's prospects were not as great as we'd all been representing. My stock options were underwater. And I responded to an ad for editor-in-chief of Bioscience, the monthly journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. And I worked there for over a decade. This is a broad scope review magazine journal with a historical focus on ecosystems and organismal biology. It has a lot of peer-reviewed content, but also commissioned features, book reviews, and opinion sections. My experience at Scientific American was useful for helping academics express their thoughts. I think when we move on to the next slide here. But I also ran a proper anonymous peer-review system. Scientific American does not have a peer-review system, by the way. I mean, they do have things reviewed, but at least when I was there, it was informal and not anonymous. So I had to get used to a different kind of writing and editing there. The changes that peer-review forces on an author are very different from those suggested by an editor when you're writing for the general public. So Scientific American edits one way, but peer reviewers actually usually want all the caveats inserted. The articles tend to get longer, more difficult to read, but of course, that's what you need for scientific accuracy and in a professional journal, that's what you're looking for. So I had to adapt, but it was enjoyable work and it felt honest. You know, we were telling the truth as best we could. I commissioned scores of book reviews and opinion pieces, wrote monthly editorials, and supervised staff who looked after commissioned features. Toward the latter part of my time at Bioscience, one project that we worked on, which was very useful later, was about data availability and data repositories. There was starting to be concern, there was starting to be pressure about making data available, linking that to papers or putting it in repositories, all the complications and problems with that. So we organized some workshops, I participated in those, and I learned a lot about the scientific perspective, the difficulties of curating data for public presentation and linking to it from articles, but we had that going at Bioscience. And later, when I moved to the Endocrine Society as executive editor, that came in very useful because that's something we're concerned about at the Endocrine Society also. So at Endocrine Society, I was initially involved mainly with the launch of IFJS, Journal of the Endocrine Society, but now I also work on JCM, endocrinology and endocrine reviews. And I don't make decisions on manuscripts, as I did at Bioscience, but I make sure that the editors who do make decisions have access to peer reviews and that they and the authors know the rules governing our publications. Endocrine Society journals publish articles on a much larger scale than Bioscience does. So I'm now not involved with individual manuscripts as I was at Bioscience. Basically, I'm called in to look at a manuscript only if there's some kind of problem, difference of opinion between peer reviewers or between the authors and the peer reviewers or between the authors and the society. And there's never a dull moment, things crop up all the time. The job is very much about optimizing processes so that they can be executed efficiently by staff on a large scale, adapting to trends in the publishing business, at the same time, ensuring integrity and fair treatment for the authors. I still use lessons learned in previous positions to be consistent about rules and to protect the journal and staff in various ways. So one has to be aware about copyright law, about libel law, and make sure the journal is on a safe trajectory in all of that. And we do also pay a lot of attention to ensuring diversity on the editorial boards who make the decisions on the journals. Work-life balance, we've had comments about work-life balance. I work more than the regulation 37 and a half hours a week, every week. And sometimes there are things that come up that need to be done by tomorrow morning or need to be done by the end of the day and I'll work in the evening if necessary to get that done. But it's not excessively more than 37.5 hours a week. And I consider that I enjoy a good work-life balance. It's not ridiculously more than that. These days, though, I think anybody wanting to go into journalism should go to journalism school, which I never did. I don't think there are many people around like Sir John prepared to give somebody a chance just because they say they like the idea of writing. Science journalism was and still, some science journalism was and still is uncritical. And sometimes I ran with the pack, but I think I did some good pieces. There are fewer science journalism positions now than there were though, as newspapers are folded all over the country and in other countries. So soon there might be even fewer because of chat GPT and similar inventions. So to be a publications professional these days, I think you'd be wise to take a formal course, go to university to study publication. We rely in the endocrine society increasingly on technology, plagiarism, detection, image manipulation, software, search engine optimization. All these are things that we have to pay attention to to publish journals which are competitive while maintaining high standards of scientific integrity. There are new threats like paper mills. We are working actively to combat this threat. They're not going away. Open access is moving ahead slowly, but it brings challenges. Not everybody is totally enthusiastic about open access, including a lot of scientists. So in summary, I'd say writing articles and running journals requires different skills, but if you like getting words right and if you're interested in science, both of them can lead to a very satisfying career. I'll leave it at that. Thanks. Thank you. I'm a community endocrinologist, my husband is in business, and the thing he says he likes about my job is that I don't have a boss. Nobody tells me how to do my job. People tell me I need to see X number of people and so on and so forth, so I'm just curious. So how do you interact with your bosses, and what are your deliverables at the end of the day? That is, what makes them keep you instead of fire you? So like I said, I have many levels of bosses. So I write a primary review, that's my deliverable, and that has to get signed off by various levels before it ultimately becomes policy and the decision. Usually the higher ups agree with the decision that I'm making, and if not, there's a lot of discussion. The experience that I've run into, I've only been there for two years, but our wonderful colleagues in pharma are always asking us about cases when we should exercise regulatory flexibility, and so there can be different perspectives on when we need to be flexible and not, and there can be just disagreements, and ultimately, there was a case like that that I encountered, and me and the primary team were thinking flexibility, our division director didn't want to set a precedent of being too flexible, but the higher ups from him thought flexibility was right, but they said, we're going to support you as a primary division director for this, and if that's what you want to be, we're going to support it. So there are different people at different levels, but we all talk to each other, and I think we try to make the right call, but yeah, definitely, you have bosses, you have to talk to them and work with them, and it's a system that's designed to have that back and forth. Yeah, and the industry is not any different than the government, so I can reassure you, you have, usually at the beginning of the year or before, actually, you set your mid-year and your end-of-year goals, and you need to deliver. If you don't, there are consequences, right, your salary, your promotion, but usually, unless there is a very good reason that you cannot meet a specific goal, it's understandable, but if you cannot do the obvious, the basic, then, yes, you might have a problem. So I'll just add, my experience is probably most similar to Ray's, that at CSR, I work as part of a review branch, so it's a group of SROs, and we all have study sections in endocrinology and metabolism, and there's one leader of that, and we call her the chief, which is kind of the equivalent of the chair of a department, if you will. So although we all work independently, you know, at times, we network and do teamwork, but ultimately, she's the only person I have to report to, and she's the person that does my yearly evaluation, so what my deliverable is, is to make sure that I run these peer review meetings three times a year, they're carried out, you know, with integrity, you know, everything gets completed, the paperwork gets done at the end of each cycle. In terms of, you know, how I feel about, you know, working in that sort of maybe a little bit more hierarchical situation compared to academia is, you know, I first came in thinking that, you know, it's government, it's going to be really stringent, I have to follow all these rules and procedures, but in fact, it was quite surprising how much more flexibility and freedom I have in my position now compared to academia, and if I can just give you an example, in my prior position as a faculty member, we had, you know, software that we had to use to administer exams, right, online exams, and the software was designed by some IT person, didn't teach in a classroom, never gave a lecture, never wrote an exam question, so it was a disaster, and when we asked about, you know, making changes to it, we were simply told, no, you're just going to use this, whereas at CSR, the software we used to manage all the data from all these review meetings was made and designed by SROs who do this job, so it's like we have a lot of input, we have a lot of flexibility and freedom to design the tools that we use all the time, so I was really pleasantly surprised how much, you know, freedom we have in our jobs now compared to academia, which I never thought I would say for a government position. Thanks. Well, yeah, it's the deliverables, you know, we have a contract with Oxford Academic to provide content for these journals, and we have to provide a certain amount, and to fill up the issues, so at the most basic level, we have to keep the peer review process going, we have to make sure that scientists know that they can submit to our journals. It requires a certain amount of tact, because there have to be rules, and sometimes authors have different ideas about what they would like to publish, and we have to say, no, sorry, you can't do that, but this is why, but you could do that instead, so, yeah, I would be in trouble if I said to my boss one day, sorry, we haven't got any articles for the next month's issue, or if, you know, we intensely annoyed a lot of scientists by rejecting all of their papers without good reason, that's the kind of thing we've got to stop happening. If we started providing lots of very poor quality reviews, people would be unhappy about that, and they wouldn't want to submit to our journals, so we have to work hard to find out who potential reviewers are, make sure the systems all work, make sure all the associate editors know how to work the systems properly so that they get a good choice of reviewers, chase people, so if they're not providing reviews on time, so, yeah, deliverables, and diplomacy with scientists, authors, and with editors. Hi, thank you for all of your insights. One of the things that can be very daunting for a clinician is the idea that this is a one-way exit with no recourse if you're like, oh, that wasn't a good fit. What were your thoughts when you left clinical medicine? Do you try and keep a foot in the door or did you just like slam that shut and go running? I'd love your input on that. I guess I'll start again. Gosh, I'm coming up in about two years since I've seen a patient, which is kind of bizarre now that I think of it. I do kind of miss my patients. One thing that I didn't mention about FDA, I'm not sure if it's like this at NIH, but of those 40 hours a week, you get four hours of professional development that you can use on something that's not related to your deliverables and your projects. Some of my colleagues use that to do a half-day of clinic and still see patients. That is a nice opportunity. I have not taken that yet, but I might in the future. Like you said, sometimes you have to decide where you're going to focus most of your effort. I was mostly laboratory research, so I was already only doing a day of clinic per week anyway. I guess you have to decide if that's enough to do right by your patients as well. Yes, I had that separation anxiety when I moved to the industry. That's why I continue to have a clinic once a week. But over time, literally this job absorbs you. You cannot even see patients. You don't have time. I stopped, and then I went back for another year or two, and then COVID hit. It was easy to say no, but then it depends on your workload. Actually, the longer you stay in the industry and you get more responsibility as you go up the ladder, your workload increases significantly. It's not that, of course, you miss it sometimes, but if you do clinical research as I do, I'm close to patients because I see the data of the patients every day. I speak with physicians when it comes to safety to understand. I learn from the data that I get, so it's not I'm completely out of pain. I still am doing research using data generated by others, but I'm asking that. I'm driving the protocol. I'm designed to say, okay, I want to do this, this, this, and they have to follow the protocol. So you have some control somehow. You can always go back. You can always go back, but I don't think once you get used to this and you see the benefits and you can actually do for patients. When you see patients in your clinic, of course, you take care of the patient, but if you can develop a new medication that you can help people, patients that you were not able to do something before, that's a huge thing. In the industry, in contrast to academia, you have to worry about funding. That's the only thing that you have secure. You have support. That's the only thing that you have, but in academia, you're trying to find the secure funding to do what you can do like in the industry. That's why oftentimes I know you're trying to get funding through the NIH, but I think a lot of the academics now, they get quite good support from the industry. So just keep that in mind as well as an additional resource to your research. Technically, I am paid by industry as well through the Prescription Drug User Fee Act. So if the federal government shuts down for any reason, I still get paid. So my question is primarily for the, well, for I guess all of you, but for the FDA and industry type jobs. So I'm coming out of fellowship and one of the things that I see if I look at any other non-clinical job description, and then the first thing I see is like, oh, you have a PhD and it's just like, ugh. How much, how important is it for getting these non-clinical jobs to have a, or you've done lots of clinical research, so how much does that matter in terms of being able to get a job that's non-clinical if you don't have a lot of research background outside of clinical work? Again, yeah, I can take that. So of course, you know, if you have like a significant medical background, you know, with research, you know, being an investigator, that can help you get a higher title, you know, when you get to the industry. But you can start, you know, with a lower position, right? And you can get there. So you don't have to demonstrate it to have like an impressive CV, you know, to join the industry. I can tell you that's not the requirement at all. Because what you do in the industry is kind of standardized. And you don't need to have necessarily medical background to do. I can tell you a lot of people that farm these, that they do medical monitor of clinical trials, they don't have to be, you know, physicians. Or you can see physicians that they don't want to be medical, they don't want to just deal with patients that just, you know, for example, work in, you know, preclinical stuff, or medical writing, they do other stuff that are not engaged in actually the protocols and the actual studies. So that should not be a concern. And of course, if you see the requirements, of course, you have to have a degree, right, to join. But I can tell you, I had a number of students, actually. Because the industry offers internships. So you can work, you know, for the summer, so you can see how it is. You can get an idea of what is happening. But I can tell you it was like two people that they came and they work in clinical operation actually how to organize a clinical study. And they were planning to apply for the medical school, and they're still working with me after 10 years. Because they got on track, you know, they got the salary, they say why to worry about that. So they never applied. So you don't need to be an expert of the experts to join in, you know, the industry. That's not a requirement at all. I'm not sure how. Yeah, I would say the same at FDA. People start as clinical reviewers, sometimes right after fellowship, you know, during a fellowship project, they did some clinical research, that can be enough. Usually they've done a couple of years after that, either of practice, or, but had done some research in the past in fellowship. You know, having a PhD was definitely not a, I was probably overqualified when I went in. But what they were looking for was, you know, how you think and approach the problems. One of the requirements was to give a talk. They waived that to me, I guess, because of my background. But when they talked to me, it was like, how do you deal with, you know, making decisions in the face of uncertainty? Because that's really what, you know, what we're having to do. We're never going to have all of the information on safety, for sure. Efficacy, we can, we care about efficacy. But we're never going to have full information to me, and, you know, we have to balance the risks and the benefits, and make, ultimately, a yes or no decision. And they wanted to see how we thought, how our thought process was in that type of a world. So it's somewhat having a little bit of a background. You've got to know clinical medicine and your specialty, and have a little exposure to research to know what you're getting. But, you know, like you said, they teach you how to do your job. And you're not expected to know where you're going, yeah? And if I may add one thing, you know, half of my colleagues, you know, my fellowship at the NIH, they moved right after the fellowship straight to the NIH, and they're still working there. Actually, the first meeting that I had with the FDA, when I joined the industry, when I sat across the table from them, I knew half of them. It felt like I was in a reunion, not in an FDA meeting. It's very easy for them, because the transition is very quick, from a government facility to another government job. Very, very easy. I can tell you, they didn't even bother to apply for, you know, faculty, you know, position in other studios. They go straight to the FDA. It's very easy for them to do this. So as I said, even right after fellowship, you can join the FDA. Yeah. That's actually for the government people. So do you get affected for the government shutdown? I guess, no? Not at FDA, no. We're mostly supported by the Prescription Drug User Fee Act and not from the federal budget. So I think NIH does get shut down. Yeah, NIH is affected. So if the government is theoretically shut down for a month, then it means your salary will be affected? Or how does that? Yes, and it gets tricky with review meetings because that means we can't open up our computers, which means we can't run review meetings, which means applicants' grants don't get reviewed. So another question is for all four of you. How do you feel about your job security and about the future of the positions that you are in and for people to be able to potentially stay in them for a long time? The good thing in the industry is that there are always opportunities. Actually, you see a lot of people jumping from one company to another very quickly. Actually, I'm the exception to the rule. It's extremely rare to see someone being for 10 years in the same company. So that's most of the people that jump from one job to another because there are so many opportunities, so, so many opportunities. You have no idea. The companies, actually, they're struggling keeping their employees because there is another company that offer a better salary, better option, better opportunities. And I can tell you for physicians, the demand is so high, there is absolutely no way to stay without a job. But I can tell you what is very in high demand are people that they work in clinical operations because these are the people that they actually organize in the executing the studies. These people, you can see, they go from one company to another every year because they get offers that are better than physicians, oftentimes. So for the industry, I can tell you there is no concern about that. You can easily find another job very, very quickly. The government. Job security is very good in the government. If you're meeting your performance metrics, it's pretty hard to lose your job. You might have to change your focus. Like, I'm on the obesity team. It's a booming time for obesity drugs, as you all know. They've hired two more clinical reviewers since I came on two years ago. If in the future there's less obesity drugs, we'll just, we can find positions in other types of review divisions. But I think the job security and the benefits and the pension are all just big, big perks of working for the government. And to echo what Ray said, I think regardless of which political party of the government you're looking at, I think they all agree that science is important. So NIH funding has always been, money to the NIH has been really good. And then, of course, the NIH has a lot of funding to give out. So during the pandemic, when labs were shut down and they were sitting at home, grant applications soared. So that's why they hired a bunch of SROs like me at the time to process and manage the review of those applications. So I think, yeah, I agree. There's SROs that have been doing this job for years, decades even, and then other SROs that after a few years they jump around and do program, or they move to the FDA or USDA or other agencies and essentially do similar types of jobs. So yeah. I think academic publishing is relatively safe compared to certainly newspaper or magazine journalism. The number of outlets for science journalism has decreased, as I said, drastically over the past 30 years. And for that reason, I would really advise anybody to think very hard if they were sure they wanted to do it to embark on that as a career. Academic publishing is more stable. And I think there will continue to be academic journals. And I think they will need high-level editors guiding their policies and making sure that they publish good stuff. Great. If there's no other questions, we will. Oh, you have one more question. Sorry. What is it that you wish would be different or you don't like about your current job? I mean, no situation is perfect unless you live in France and be Emeline from Emeline Paris. I think they invited us because we like our jobs. Yeah. We cannot say anything bad about the job. So yeah, of course, there are things that you know. But unfortunately, the longer you stay in a job and you go up the ladder, although you think that things will improve, actually, it's the other way around. More responsibilities, right? Yeah, salary-wise, it's nice. You know? But I don't think that you can, even if I wish for something, it's kind of realistic or feasible. I think it's a standard environment. There is no way to improve many things. Like little things, maybe. But majority of the time, it's a standard thing. Because if we don't check all the boxes, then the FDA is not going to approve our work. So that's why there is no much flexibility. Of course, if you work in a big company, it's different because the resources are more. For smaller companies, it's more challenging because you have to do more things than your job title, your responsibilities. When I joined the company, it was only 30 people working. Now it's over 300. So of course, a lot of things I don't have to do. But my responsibilities have increased 10 times more. So everything comes with a cost. I was just going to add that in terms of our primary stakeholders, the applicant, and not everybody is going to be happy with the outcome of the review. So I guess that's the one sort of downfall of it. But to counteract that, I think we've done a lot to train reviewers to make sure that applicants are treated fairly. So to avoid bias and to increase diversity on the panel so they represent the general scientific community. And so hopefully, those things will improve. But of course, you're not going to make everybody happy. Well, I could absolutely echo that. We do not take any pleasure in declining to publish a submitted manuscript. We recognize that people have put a lot of work into it. But the way the business works is we are committed to publishing the best that we can from the articles for the manuscripts that are submitted. So it's unfortunate if people are upset by a negative decision. There are day-to-day annoyances. I guess what I'd mention is that universities, when somebody moves out of a position or retires, universities never put something on their email address saying this person is no longer working here or this person's retired. They just let the email address exist indefinitely. And sometimes, it can be quite a long time before we realize that nobody is reading the invitations we sent. We try and patrol this. We try and clean our databases. But I wish universities would tell us when people end their jobs. That way, we would not waste time inviting reviews from people who aren't seeing the invitations. So that's a day-to-day annoyance. But that's a small thing. I am so guilty of that. Oh, my gosh. I've had so many review requests that I, yeah. So I'll just wrap up by saying that I know you came to this session because you're wondering what else is out there in terms of alternative careers. And you can seem pretty entrenched in your current job. It's just what you've always been doing. And if anything that we've said about other paths that you can take is interesting, really look into it and think about it. I forgot to say on my last slide, it was like, don't wait till the next pandemic to assess. See what's out there, and you may find something that's right for you. So I would just like to thank our speakers. Please give them one big round of applause for that last session of the day.

video

speakers

career paths

FDA

pharmaceutical industry

scientific review officer

NIH

academic publishing

work-life balance

drug reviews

physicians

career advancement