Stories from Beyond Academia #3: Tom Hanna
PhD in Physics
If you’re a PhD wondering what potential employers beyond academia might be looking for, then this is an interview you don’t want to miss!
Here we introduce Dr Tom Hanna, a PhD in Physics from the University of Oxford. Tom switched from academia after seven years as a full-time researcher: there were a few reasons contributing to Tom’s decision to make the switch, and he worked in a few non-academic roles before deciding to start his own company.
That company is Hypercube Scientific, of which Tom is founder and CEO. His company actively seeks to recruit staff with scientific training, and he shares with us some of his reasons for this.
Tom reminds us that it’s never too early to be thinking about your options, and never too late to make a change.
Jonathan McGuire: Tom, thanks so much for joining us! For this newsletter, we've been talking to people who have got a PhD and then some point they've moved out of academia into a non-academic career. Not only are you a member of this group yourself, but you also work with people who are coming out of academia. Plenty to discuss! But I want to start back at your PhD - could you tell us a bit about what field you were in, what you were looking into, and your findings?
Tom Hanna: Sure, well, I was a theoretical physicist. I worked in the physics of ultra-cold gases. The way atomic motion and atomic collisions look when the atoms are very, very close to absolute zero. So they move extremely slowly, and when two of them bang into each other, it doesn't look like a couple of balls bouncing off each other - the picture we normally might have - it looks a bit more like two ripples on a lake if you throw in two stones, passing through each other. And I did a lot of work on theoretical calculations about these collision processes. In particular, how you can control those collisions using magnetic fields and laser beams. It was an area where theory and experiment worked very closely together. I was predicting things that were measured in the lab within months, or explaining experiments that had happened months ago. So it was a very exciting field – and still is a couple of decades later. It's of relevance to things like quantum computing, of course (that was a sexy application back then), to precision manufacturing, precision measurements. Everyone's probably heard of atomic clocks - that's actually how they work: driving transitions between atomic states in a cold gas. And so that's the field I was in. The exact findings are maybe a little esoteric, but had to do with how efficiently you could make molecules out of atomic gases. You can tune the collisions with a magnetic field, like I said, and if you ramp it in the right way or oscillate at the right frequency, then you can bind together very weakly bound diatomic molecules. And so I did some calculations regarding that process and the limits to its efficiency.
JM: That's fascinating and very much out of my wheelhouse, but I'm interested to hear about how closely the theoretical and experimental physics were working together in that field. So you did the PhD and then stuck around and did a postdoc after - did you stay researching that same topic?
TH: Similar topic, yes. I went to the US and worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). They worked on atomic clocks: they maintain the time standard for the United States government, amongst other things. You can go to time.gov - the most interesting site on the internet - and they'll tell you the time. So I was very distantly involved with that.
Things that don't look great at first, sometimes turn out great.
JM: To think that something as everyday as a clock can have this deep physics behind it and such a deep level of research and understanding. And after your postdoc, you moved out of academia. What inspired you to move out of academia into industry?
TH: Two motivations that I think will be familiar to a lot of your readers. First of all, after seven years as a full-time researcher, 10 papers, all I could get was another bog standard postdoc position. And I was a bit frustrated, I guess, that I didn't appear to be climbing the academic ladder at all (or if I was it was glacially slow and there was a long climb ahead of me). So that was one: the realisation that there may be opportunities out there that I hadn't thought of. And the second one was my wife had to keep moving for me to get the next job, the next job. And she was tremendously supportive, she was happy to come along again, but I thought, well, it's not really good for her career either. And so we should try to be somewhere for a bit longer.
JM: Yeah, that sort of nomadic existence, especially as an early career researcher can really be difficult. I know when I was in academia, I thought that that was a feature. But I know that a lot of people will report that that's actually really challenging,
TH: At some point it becomes a bug instead of a feature!
JM: Absolutely. And when you decided to make that switch, how did you decide what field to go into? What considerations were in mind for you when deciding on a non-academic career path?
TH: Look, I tried all sorts of things. And I'd encourage anyone following after me to cast a wide net as well, talk to lots of people, because you never know what will work out. Things that don't look great at first, sometimes turn out great. I applied to several jobs in the US, where we were living. Nothing worked out, partly due to visa issues. I got offered a job in Norway - an exciting job that was a high-tech startup in oil and gas, and they're still around I believe. But I wasn’t sure about the location. So that was one case where I thought the job looked alright, but the lifestyle maybe not. And then what eventually worked out was a consulting job in Perth, joining the mining boom. Now the mining boom promptly ended as soon as I got here, but that's another story. I thought it's Australia, it's sunny, it will have decent job opportunities for my wife, and I had had some interest in consulting and making a tangible difference and hopefully earning a bit of money. In fact, I had tried to start a sort of pro bono consulting group while I was at NIST and the University of Maryland, and that was a bit of a flop actually, but it turned my mind to ideas of consulting which is what I've gone on to do.
JM: You mention that you tried your own consulting thing. Was there anything else that you did to prepare for moving from academia into other kinds of work?
TH: Nothing that I should have done! The thing I tell people now is learn Python, for example. I didn't. I'd done my PhD in C and then used MATLAB a lot at NIST. And then of course I came to industry, and they asked me to write Excel macros. I didn't learn any of those specific things - I picked all that up on the job, Excel and then Python. So, let's say no as the short answer to your question, I don't think I did it properly at all.
JM: So the tools you were using didn't carry over, but were there any particular skills or knowledge or experience from your PhD and postdoc that carried over into that consulting work and the work you've done since?
TH: Yeah, all sorts. I learned a lot of very useful general skills like analysis, like programming, like managing a big project - as you do when you're a PhD student and work on a problem for three years, or three and a half in my case. And the other, because I was in a field where experimentalists would come with all sorts of questions, was a willingness to have a go. You get questions, you maybe don't know exactly how you're going to do it, but you say 'Yeah, I'll have a go at that for you. Let's see what we can work out together.'
JM: That sounds like it would transition very well across to the consulting work that you do where a client maybe has an idea that you haven't come across before and you’ve got to figure out how would one even approach this?
TH: Yeah, this was particularly in one chapter of my career at Fortescue for four years. The secret to my success there was I always had a go. I've never sent anyone away saying ‘that's not my job’. And if you can be that person, the go-to person, that will help you in all sorts of contexts.
JM: Absolutely. And so, you've obviously done pretty well in consulting because now you're the founder and CEO of your own firm. Could you tell us a bit about what Hypercube Scientific does?
TH: So we do a few things. The main theme is helping clients bring more value out of their capital-intensive equipment. We work with mining companies, with healthcare companies like hospitals, with agriculture companies. Companies that have to operate millions or even billions of dollars of infrastructure. And they have to make all that investment ahead of time and then once they're there, they want to run as efficiently as they can. And so we build digital twins to reproduce someone's business operations. We calibrate that against operational data. And then we help them ask a lot of ‘what if’ questions of the digital twins: ‘what if we invest some money over here?’, ‘what if we change an operational policy or procedure over there?’, ‘where are the bottlenecks in our system?’, ‘why aren't we doing a bit better?’. So that's one thing, the supply chain simulations, as we call them, capacity analysis. Another thing we do is scheduling tools. One of Australia's major mining companies does all their integrated shipping and railing off our platform - we built a mission critical, 24/7 app for an ASX20 company. And then the third thing we do is data science and advanced analysis. Sometimes we are just first principles, scientific thinkers, bringing some smart and rigorous analysis to messy data and ambiguous business world problems.
JM: I think you have some experience that I think some of our readers will find really interesting, because you're now on the other side of that hiring desk - although I don't think I've actually been at a hiring ‘desk’ for about three years now. But you recruit a lot of people with PhDs, has that been a deliberate decision to go after people with graduate degrees?
TH: It has certainly been a deliberate decision to go after people with good scientific training. I don't believe that a business analyst who takes a short course on Coursera and calls themselves a data scientist is the same as someone who has spent several years practicing the deep and difficult art of scientific analysis. I think all scientists are data scientists and so those are the people that I look for. For their, hopefully, deeper understanding of the world and ability to gain new skills.
In 10 years’ time, you can be 65 with 10 years’ experience, or you can be 65.
JM: What skills are you looking for in those candidates when they come over? You've mentioned that deep analytical thinking that one develops from academic work - what else are you looking for?
TH: I have a saying that there is nothing common about common sense. In fact, it's one of the rarest of things. And so part of the scientific training, which is under-appreciated I think, is order of magnitude analysis, or sense checking you might call it. Have I just used my wonderful model to prove something that is patently ridiculous? And the sooner people can ask that question of their own work, the sooner we can fix it. So that's one. And a certain amount of resilience. You will overcome some frustrations and mistakes to get your PhD, I know I did. And that was character forming. I also find that there's some amount of dedication in the community of people who've done the hard yards to get a PhD that can translate into a culture of working hard to bring value to the client.
JM: And are there any pitfalls or some negative sides you've seen from people coming straight over from academia?
TH: Leading scientists is often compared to herding cats, but I wonder if this is unfair to cats. Scientists can often know better, can’t they? And so I've had various people completely new to the field of simulation modeling in mining telling me the way something ought to be done. And I've had to respond, ‘well, this is the way I want it, because this is the way the client wants it, and so this is the way we’ll do it.’ Another is that first principles thinking can go too far. You cannot derive from first principles, the operational philosophies of the client - you just have to ask. And a willingness to work iteratively, shall we say, is I think not always natural to scientists. I was certainly trained that when you write your paper as a scientist you must dot every ‘I’ and cross every ‘T’ and consider every angle and do everything completely and thoroughly and then you can go and talk to the people. Whereas if you do that in my company, by the time you’re finished, the client won't care. They will have moved on. So you do enough to get them talking, to show some progress, to help them think through the question as well as the answer and then they've got an opportunity to say ‘actually, that's not quite what I need. Let's refine and look at it again.’
JM: Actually, that was one of the first things my first boss in my first non-academic job spoke to me about, that relationship between depth and rigor, and that time is going to be different here than it was when you're at uni.
As my final question, you've already touched on this when you were talking about the things that you didn't do to prepare. But what advice would you give someone considering the switch from academia into a non-academic role?
TH: Yeah, have a go. You'll find smart people in industry as well. And there's this thing where people feel like they're wasting their experience. First of all, you haven't, you've learnt all these skills you're going to take with you. Second of all, if you're frustrated enough to be thinking about moving from academia, then it's wasted if you stay as well. Because if you stay, you're just going to keep being frustrated. So respond to where you are now, not to where you thought you would be or where you might think you should be. That’s one piece of advice. Another is, I've had people younger than me, and I don't consider myself old by any stretch of the imagination, but people younger than me say well I'm too old to go start something new. Rubbish. I've seen people change careers at all stages from 20s to 60s. I took a course in glassblowing once from a lady who was in her mid 60s, we'll say 65. And she started this business, started glassblowing when she was 55. She had said to her husband, well, I'm too old to go and start a business and do something new, and her husband told her think of it this way: in 10 years’ time, you can be 65 with 10 years’ experience, or you can be 65. So she did it and there we were and she was happy. What can I say?
When you go to industry, it's not that you're getting a job for life. Those things don't exist anymore. But you are going to have skills and experience that are in demand, so the day that you are laid off because your projects have ended or the company's running out of work, or whatever may come up - and things will come up, doesn't matter how good you are if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time - it can happen. But the day it does happen, you will have these transferable skills, you'll have a bit of industry experience, you'll have some smarts about what job is good for you and your situation next, and you'll be able to find another job very quickly. And the other thing I've noticed with friends who went into industry - I mean I went from a consulting company to a mining company to a bank to running my own business, same sort of work - but lots of people I know, they leave their PhD, or they leave academia, and they make their best guess of what they want. They get there and it's not what they want. And so a year or two later they change fields, and several friends did this. And then the second field is the right one, and that lasts much longer. So never be afraid of a fresh beginning and never be afraid of another one.
JM: I think that's fantastic advice. I wish I'd heard that when I was in the process of considering the switch beyond academia because I really thought I have to pick the one thing I'll do forever and that certainly hasn't turned out to be the case for me.
TH: One last reflection I’ll make around what I did for my PhD: I finished my PhD 15 years ago, and all those specifics are gone. But the general skills I picked up, they're still with me. A lot of the people I interacted with, they're still with me. Those are things you carry with you for the rest of your life.
And with that, we thank Tom for chatting with us and for giving us so much to think about!
For us, it was fascinating to hear about the skills that Tom values in PhDs he’s recruited: their scientific training and ability to sense-check, the character-forming resilience, and a dedication that can help bring value to clients.
On a personal note, we’ve each changed jobs a few times (one of us has a slightly more eclectic mix of jobs in the back catalogue), and so that idea of not being afraid of a fresh beginning also really resonated.
Do you have a story to share? If you’re a PhD who has moved beyond academia and you’re interested in sharing your story, please get in touch with us via LinkedIn (Sam, Jonathan) - we’d love to hear from you.
P.S. Here’s to being 65 with ten years’ experience!
Interviews have been edited for length and clarity. Views, thoughts, and opinions expressed by persons interviewed in this series are solely that of the persons interviewed and do not reflect the views, opinions, or position of Sam, Jonathan or Sequitur Consulting.