S4E7: Milestone-Based Decision-Making In and Out of the Lab

This episode, we continue our discussions about cultivating a career with guest Kelly Gillespie, Nursery Solutions Lead at Bayer Crop Science. Kelly got her bachelor's degree at Knox College, a small liberal arts college in Illinois. She then moved on to do a PhD with Lisa Ainsworth at the University of Illinois. She did a short postdoc with Dick Sayre at the Danforth Center before moving to Monsanto, where she has worked for 9 years, staying with the company through the merger with Bayer. We talk with Kelly about her publication, “Greater antioxidant and respiratory metabolism in field‐grown soybean exposed to elevated ozone under both ambient and elevated CO2”, which was published in 2011 in Plant Cell & Environment. She talks about what it was like to work at the USDA Free Air Concentration Enrichment (FACE) site, the teamwork that was needed to collect her data, and how this experience taught her to work in highly collaborative environments. Kelly also shares her career journey and the factors she considered when choosing to make the transition from academia to industry. Kelly emphasizes a “milestone-based” approach, where each decision is broken into small steps and evaluated at checkpoints along the way. She talks about what it takes to succeed in a science career in industry, what might be familiar and what might be surprising to someone with an academic background, and emphasizes the value of making connections with other professionals. SHOW NOTES: Gillespie, K. M., Xu, F., Richter, K. T., Mcgrath, J. M., Markelz, R. C., Ort, D. R., ... & Ainsworth, E. A. (2012). Greater antioxidant and respiratory metabolism in field‐grown soybean exposed to elevated O3 under both ambient and elevated CO2. Plant, Cell & Environment, 35(1), 169-184. Join ASPB Plantae Webinar: Ask Me Anything: Plant Science Careers in Industry The Awesomest Seven Year Postdoc Plantae Webinar: Prioritization and Work / Life Balance: Do Less, Work Better Plantae Mentoring Center - Sign up to be a mentor or mentee Kelly’s LinkedIn Profile Twitter Handles @kmgillespie @ehaswell @baxtertwi @taprootpodcast

You can listen to S4E7: Milestone-Based Decision-Making In and Out of the Lab online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

S4E7: Milestone-Based Decision-Making In and Out of the Lab is an episode from The Taproot by Plantae / American Society of Plant Biologists.

This episode is 0:39:19 long.

This episode was published on Feb 4, 2020.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from The Taproot when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.