Your browser does not support the audio element.Joan Cordiner took steps to “de-risk” her career when she moved into academia. Having spent her entire career up to that point in industry, she left her role as a technical and change manager role at chemical company Syngenta, and joined the University of Sheffield, UK, in 2020.
Joan Cordiner’s career in chemical engineering started in 1987. But she's a relative newcomer to academia. She was always in two minds about what she wanted to do. As a young woman, she had received sponsorship from the chemical company ICI, now known as Syngenta, to continue her research and do a PhD.
This gave Joan the opportunity to reflect on her career and herself. So she decided to take one of those aptitude tests, one that she'd actually been asking her trainees to do as well.And it suddenly occurred to me, I mean, this is really crazy. But it just kind of, you know, sometimes you have these “aha” moments.
And that kind of said, “Well, actually, that sounds like a perfect job. And I should just go for it. And I should have the confidence to go for it.”Julie Gould 3:36 Because typically academics focus in an area, and my interests are quite wide, because I've had a wide and varied career. And I managed, you know, a wide area.And the biggest fear, you know. Especially when people say, “What's your field?” Like, “I don't know yet.”
And as part of being a manager I had to manage process safety. I was responsible legally for process safety, you know, in a large site in the US, and other jobs before that. And that's why I really want to go back to the science. Not that much about maybe academic itself, but even just helping science to thrive using machine learning on AI tools.For more than a year, he was looking for a role. The first one he tried was at the institution that he did his PhD at, The Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, in the Heidelberg area in Germany.