Stepping stones

摘要

In late 2009, Mark Brown was at the end of a six-year postdoctoral position in parasi-tology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Having completed a PhD in molecular and cellular pharmacology, he was primed for a position in academia. But he hungered to move into industry. "I really wanted to take what I'd learned and apply it, and I felt that academia really didn't offer me that option whereas industry did," says Brown. But the economy was in trouble and industry jobs in research and development were disappearing. Prospects looked grim. Brown learned about the Postdoc Professional Masters (PPM) at the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences in Claremont, California, one of the growing number of programmes that aim to provide practical, hands-on business savvy to graduates with PhDs and medical doctorates who want to enter the biosciences industry (see Nature 469,569; 2011).