Name: Dipanwita Ghose (she/her)
PhD: Psychology/Neuroscience, Vanderbilt University, 2013
What was your main area of research?
For my PhD, I studied the neural circuits underlying multisensory processing in the brain. For my postdoc, I studied the synaptic mechanisms underlying cocaine addiction.
What is your current job?
I am a Director for Global Scientific Publications, Psych at Abbvie in Cambridge Massachusetts.
My job entails:
Publication and communication plans: Drive strategy, development, and execution of scientific communication and publication plans for assets in different stages of clinical development. Lead literature reviews to identify publication gaps that can inform publication planning.
Publications: Lead content development and execution of abstracts, posters, oral presentations, manuscripts, plain language summary (PLS), publication extenders such as podcasts in collaboration with cross-functional team members and key opinion leaders (KOL) authors.
Data communication: Drive the interpretation and communication of complex scientific and clinical data across different therapeutic areas for various stakeholders including HCPs, patient community, and payers.
Vendor management: Collaboration and partnership with medical communication agencies, publication platform vendors, PLS vendors.
Budget management: Manage budget for assigned assets and indications
The best part is that I get to have data discussions with key opinion leaders in the field.
How did you find this position? What were the career steps you took to get to where you are now?
I found this job through LinkedIn.
PhD graduate ➡️ Postdoctoral fellow ➡️ Medical writer ➡️ Sr. Med writer ➡️ Associate scientific director ➡️ Scientific director
Why did you decide to not pursue a career in academia?
There was no work-life balance, and once my daughter was born it became tough to manage given I am a neurophysiologist and so my experiments would typically be 8-12 hrs long. It was constant work, poor pay, with no clear path to success. It was a difficult decision for me since I was truly enjoying my postdoc work.
What advice do you have for someone getting their PhD and looking to pursue a career outside of academia?
I never found support from my academic advisors. They thought I should just stick it out in academia and things will work out since I was doing well and publishing regularly. I just had to be patient. However, I had a lot of support from my spouse and I decided to prioritize the needs of my family after my daughter was born since we had no extended family support here and my husband and I were raising our daughter on our own from Day 1.
I think it is very important to draft your CV tailored to the job you are interested in. Focusing on highlighting the skills that the job requires is helpful and it may be surprising but as PhDs we do have a LOT of transferable skills.
I had some friends who had ventured into non-academic careers before me so I leaned on them to get a lot of the information I needed and then reached out to people via LinkedIn and requested for informational interviews and made connections that way too.
LinkedIn has been helpful, for medical communications and publications careers, getting membership for the Medical Affairs Society and International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP) is also very helpful. There are lots of resources within those websites.