UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering graduate Sophia Huang, PhD’23, said that after moving from academia to industry, “the science is not the most difficult thing.”
“Science is your happy place,” Huang, a Product Development Scientist for Belgian multinational materials company Syensqo, recently told a group of UChicago PME graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. “You know you’ve got this, and everybody else around you trusts you that you’ve got it.”
While a student, Huang worked for the Esser-Kahn Lab developing piezoelectric-based smart materials. She turned her UChicago PME PhD into creating high-performance thermoplastic composites for aerospace applications.
She said some of her most exciting challenges turned out to be the nuts and bolts of the working world, such as communicating high-level science to peers and clients, the logistics of bringing a product to market and learning the language of the C-suite.
“Most people that I talk to on a day-to-day basis, besides my boss, are not scientists,” Huang said. “My technician has a high school degree. I’m in a team of almost 10 people and only three of us have PhDs. Of the rest, 50% have an undergrad degree. These are the people that I talk to every day. Being able to communicate science in a way that other people from all sorts of backgrounds understand and appreciate is very important.”
Lab to market
Huang recently spoke with current UChicago PME students and postdoctoral researchers as part of the PME Alumni Career Conversation series.
The series has two main goals: showcase a variety of career paths so that current PME graduate students and postdocs can learn about options available to them, and feature distinct career stories and journeys of our alumni so that they can share their experience and advice.