CLN Daily 2025
Not every clinical chemist will graduate with a PhD or go right into academia after finishing a fellowship. That was the case for Kwaku Tawiah, PhD, DABCC, scientific partner at Roche Medical Affairs.
I was coming out of fellowship and had my mind set on going into academia, but when I saw this opportunity through my network, I thought it was a very good opportunity and something I couldn’t pass on,” said Tawiah, a virologist who joined Roche in 2022. “It combined my academic strengths and then my love for the diagnostic industry in general into one.”
At ADLM 2025 (formerly the AACC Annual Scientific Meeting & Clinical Lab Expo), Tawiah will lead a roundtable session that highlights nonacademic career pathways for clinical chemists, along with roles and responsibilities they can pursue within the pharmaceutical and diagnostic industries. He wants to give both early-career and established scientists the information and tools they need to explore all the possibilities, including in arenas where they might not realize their skills are needed.
Tawiah was inspired to pitch this session based on his own academia-to-industry career transition. “We’re going through our training right from PhD into fellowship, and the bulk of us, when we’re done, are looking for jobs only in academia,” he said. For a lot of people, that’s all they know. But having such a laser focus can mean missing out on other opportunities where clinical chemists are sorely needed.
Tawiah sat on a panel on a similar topic at last year’s ADLM Annual Meeting. “[I was] shocked by the number of questions I was getting … [that] asked about industry careers as a clinical chemist,” he said. “When people don’t even know if they’re interested in industry, they don’t know where to start.”
The roundtable session is especially critical right now, as careers in academia are more tenuous due to cuts in U.S. government funding to research and academic institutions. “Academia is not what it used to be even though, often, people thought it was among the safest places to be,” Tawiah said.
But industry will always need PhD scientists. “We use assays, and industry makes them. It’s important for scientists to be part of that conversation,” he said. “We know early on what we need. If we help with assay production and assay design, it helps everyone in the field.” That includes patients as well, he added.
Tawiah’s goal is to talk about — and dispel — some of the myths about working in industry. “Most people think it’s super competitive, and most people think it’s not stable,” he said, neither of which are true. He also wants to give scientists interested in those roles an idea about which jobs might be a good fit for them. That can be tricky because industry job titles don’t always convey what someone expects in the academic world. Moreover, those titles can vary across industries and companies too. “What my title is in my company can be completely different in a different company,” he said.
The session is designed for early-career professionals but would also benefit those who are more established, Tawiah said.
Jen A. Miller is a freelance journalist who lives in Audubon, New Jersey. +Bluesky: @byjenamiller.bsky.social