PhDs in Startups & Small Companies

James Heathers, PhD is a chief scientific officer at Cipher Skin Inc., a company focused on capturing Movement and Internal Metrics from Humans and Objects to Deliver Meaningful, Visualized Insights for healthcare.

He has a long record in academia, where he first completed a PhD in Psychophysiology at the University of Sydney in 2014, and then worked as a an Endeavour Research Fellow at Poznań University of Medical Sciences and Postdoctoral Researcher at Northeastern University.

In his career, James got familiar with a number of disciplines related to physiological measurements from people, such as physiology, data acquisition, hardware, software, signal analysis, building databases and user interfaces, testing, quality management, stakeholder management, grant acquisition, and others.

He also advocates for reproducibility and transparency in science.

Dr. Mariam Kostandyan obtained her PhD in Experimental/NeuroCognitive Psychology from Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium. In her PhD, she worked with multimodal neuro-cognitive and behavioral techniques, such as behavior studies, neuroimaging, electroencephallography, pupillometry, and brain stimulation. In the process, she became a researcher with broad expertise in behavioral and (neuro-)cognitive studies with a strong emphasis on data-driven approach and data analytics.

Yet, after her PhD she decided to step outside academia. Today, she works as a Research Consultant at a recruitment agency, Schelstraete Delacourt Associates. She is responsible for a strategic search for potential candidates on the executive level. She works with professionals across the board range of industries — from the agricultural industry to IT. Among other responsibilities, she determines the recruitment strategy based on parallels with the client or the nature of their business model, she conducts market studies to select the best candidates and conducts interviews with the candidates on the phone.

In this webinar, we will ask Mariam about her decision to switch from neurocognitive studies to recruitment. Is it difficult to make this jump? What is the most important while hiring executives? Is this true that most companies don’t trust in the management skills of fresh PhD graduates? How to increase your chances at the job interview?

In this webinar, Mariam told us about her decision to leave neurocognitive studies on behalf of the industry. How did she land a job in HR? What is the most important while hiring executives? Is this true that most companies don’t trust in the management skills of the fresh PhD graduates?

Dr. Mattias Hansson graduated from a PhD program in Mathematics at Lund University in 2013, with a thesis entitled, “Statistical Segmentation and Registration of Medical Ultrasound Data.” He then completed a Postdoc project at the University of Copenhagen and subsequently, he worked as a Scientific Programmer at the Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam. In 2018, he took a decision to leave the academic career track and become a Data Scientist. Initially, he chose to work for the Dept Agency in Rotterdam. However, as of now, Mattias works as a freelance Data Scientist.

In this webinar, Mattias told us about his post-PhD experience so far. Was the choice to work for a consultancy company a good decision? How did the corona crisis affect his job perspectives? How does he spend his time these days? How does he see himself in the future? Is it worth to do a PhD?

Dr. Andre Marques-Smith was born in Portugal to a mixed Scottish and Portuguese background. After undergraduate studies in Psychology, he completed his PhD at the University of Oxford, mapping the development of sensory cortical neural circuits in neonatal rodents. In early post-doctoral work at King’s College London, he studied the role that genes play in instructing neurons to form the right connections. He then shifted to systems neuroscience, completing projects on the development of electrophysiological tools for simultaneously recording hundreds of neurons and on neural circuits underlying instinctive vision.

However, even though Andre developed a career in science — including publishing his work in the most prestigious research journals such as Science, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron & Nature Communications — and got all the credits to stay in academia for a lifetime, in 2019, he took a personal decision to pursue a new challenge and direction in his career. After a period of self-study on Deep Neural Networks and Reinforcement Learning, he joined CoMind Technologies to work on building a wearable brain-computer interface. He is very open about his motivation and life philosophy, and he is eager to help other researchers who are hesitating on how to pursue their careers.

In this webinar, Andre told us how he re-qualified from an experimental neuroscientists towards an expert in programming neural networks — all by himself and using only the knowledge acquired online. He also shared why he believes that the startup culture is particularly welcoming to PhDs, and why it is easier to thrive in a startup than in a corporation.