Spring 2025 Physics Careers Seminar Series Continues April 25 with Dr. Laura Sampson, Senior Biostatistician at Natera

The Spring 2025 Physics Careers Seminar series continues on Friday, April 25 with a talk on "One Way to Not Be a Physicist" by Dr. Laura Sampson from Natera at 12:00 noon CT in 204 Loomis (Interaction Room). Refreshments will be provided! Details of the talk are given below.

Time: 12:00 noon CT on Friday, April 25, 2025

Location: 204 Loomis (Interaction Room). A Zoom link will also be forwarded to the Illinois Physics Grad Student email list. For a copy of the link, please contact Lance Cooper (slcooper@illinois.edu).

Titles: One Way to Not Be a Physicist

Speaker: Dr. Laura Sampson, Senior Biostatistician, Natera

Abstract:  In this talk, former physicist Laura Sampson will share her personal journey transitioning from academic research into a career in biotech, offering reflections on the emotional and practical aspects of leaving academia. She will discuss how to identify and communicate the transferable skills developed in graduate school when pursuing non-academic paths.

Bio:  Dr. Laura Sampson earned her PhD in physics from Montana State University in 2015, studying ways to use gravitational wave observations to test the predictions of general relativity. She had one postdoc in the same field, at Northwestern University, and then switched gears entirely to a postdoc in infectious disease dynamics at Penn State. After this, she stayed in the life sciences but left academia behind for a career in biotech, starting out building predictive models at a proteomics company and eventually landing where she is now as a Senior Biostatistician at Natera. Here, she designs and implements studies to assess the clinical utility of personalized genomics tests for diagnosing and monitoring cancer.

You can see the rest of the Spring 2025 Physics Careers Seminar series here: https://physics.illinois.edu/calendar/careers-seminar