Synbio Youth Meets Novozymes VP

Over 30 young scientists affiliated with Center for Synthetic Biology gathered on Thursday 25th of October to meet Vice President of Research and Development at Novozymes Nickie Spile. This was the first event within the Center's newly established Network for Young Synbio Investigators. 

Nickie Spile gave an engaging and varied introduction to the Danish biotech-firm Novozymes' research activities, its future business plans, international activities. She finished her talk by touching upon what competences and qualifications Novozymes' looked for when hiring people from the academia. 

It is the hope that the Network of Young Synbio Investigators will be an opportunity for the young scientists at the Center to socialize across the disciplines outside of the university context. The ambition for the Network is to arrange events in which the young researchers meet industry and organization representatives that might be helpful for their future career choices, whether they are convinced to continue their careers in academia or whether they would like to try out a career in the industry.

The talk was followed by a lively discussion with many interesting questions from the attending PhD-students and postdocs, such as: "In what way is research employees encouraged to gain experience in different departments within Novozymes?" Nickie Spile explained that scientists employed at Novozymes normally have the choice of three different career paths within the company: 

 Specialist, i.e. a researcher that develop in-depth expertise for a given subject by working continuously in one department

 Project Leader, i.e. a researcher with experience from more than one department who has a coordinating role and responsibility for a project

 Managerial track, i.e. a researcher with administrative potential, getting a more generalist set of experiences from a range of different departments to take a position with overall responsibility