Abstract: In this talk, former physicist Laura Sampson will share her personal journey transitioning from academic research into a career in biotech, offering reflections on the emotional and practical aspects of leaving academia. She will discuss how to identify and communicate the transferable skills developed in graduate school when pursuing non-academic paths.
Bio: Dr. Laura Sampson earned her PhD in physics from Montana State University in 2015, studying ways to use gravitational wave observations to test the predictions of general relativity. She had one postdoc in the same field, at Northwestern University, and then switched gears entirely to a postdoc in infectious disease dynamics at Penn State. After this, she stayed in the life sciences but left academia behind for a career in biotech, starting out building predictive models at a proteomics company and eventually landing where she is now as a Senior Biostatistician at Natera. Here, she designs and implements studies to assess the clinical utility of personalized genomics tests for diagnosing and monitoring cancer.