What David Searls calls his itinerancy has taken him from academia to industry to academia and then back again to industry, where today he heads Informatics at GlaxoSmithKline. Everything considered, he pronounces himself a happy traveller.
As he remarks in his article below, “for an itinerant like me, it’s gratifying to see that the economic drivers of this industry not only call for a wonderfully stimulating smorgasboard of skills, but for the continuous exchange of science, technology, and people too.”
. . . what clinched it for me was the opportunity to do things on scale, to design and build an enterprise, dedicated in purpose but able to turn on a dime, all at once rather than a grant at a time. 
Searls arrived at a corporate predecessor of GSK having helped to wed biology and computer science and form the union that is bioinformatics. Though now embedded in everyday drug discovery, bioinformatics is not far beyond its adolescence. When in 1993 Searls co-founded an annual conference for his peers around the world, barely more than 100 people showed up. There were no “bioinformaticians” in those days, just scientists of mixed disciplines who knew the power of the microprocessor would be central to making sense of the torrents of data loosed by molecular genetics. Today that same conference will typically attract upwards of 2,000.
In the early 1990s, Searls held a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania, where he had co-founded one of the first bioinformatics centres in academia. Academic settings he knew well, having earned a Master’s degree in Computer and Information Science at Penn, a PhD in Biology at the Johns Hopkins University, and undergraduate degrees in both Life Sciences and Philosophy at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. He did post-doctoral work in molecular biology at the Wistar Institute.
Yet by the time of his arrival at Penn, Searls had already made one pass through industry, at Unisys Corporation, to do research in artificial intelligence. And by 1995 industry beckoned again, this time for R&D in pharmaceuticals.
Read David Searls' account (PDF 0.1Mb), re-published by courtesy of PLoS Computational Biology.
By courtesy of Nature and Nature Reviews Drug Discovery
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