Credit: Richard Novak

Gautham Venugopalan, an analyst at the consulting firm Gryphon Scientific in Takoma Park, Maryland, describes switching from a post as a bioengineer who writes scientific papers to one as a consultant who assesses the literature to inform policy decisions.

How did you learn of jobs outside academia?

I never intended to go into an academic career. As a graduate student researching cancer biophysics, one of the reasons I chose my lab at the University of California, Berkeley, was because people there had gone on to do a variety of things: management consulting, freelance journalism, starting a company. Also, my adviser had an interest beyond the lab: he had done a White House fellowship. He would come back and say, “These are the scientific issues, and here are these societal components, political components and budget components”.

I started a non-profit with some friends and then did a policy fellowship at the US Department of State. At a networking event, I met someone from Gryphon and ended up interviewing for a job there.

What do you do now?

Gryphon is a small research and consulting firm with 50 or 60 people. We use scientific analysis to advise people on national security and global health issues.

How do you apply your training?

One thing you hear a lot when you leave academia is, “Don't you wish you could use your scientific training more?” And right now I do use it. There is still a lot of uncertainty, but instead of spending five years finding out a piece of that, you spend five months generating a report, which is a different challenge but uses a lot of the same skills.

You use evidence to justify your conclusions, and sometimes you use scientific principles to test your assumptions or to provide a range of estimates. You need to know how publishing works and how evidence works if you want to make evidence-based policy.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. See go.nature.com/ifbowr for more.