On the rugged, uninhabited Archipelago of the Recherche off the coast of Western Australia, marine ecologist Jennifer Lavers has front-row access to the wildlife she studies, because she lives nearby. In 2022, Lavers set up her successful marine-ecology research group in the tiny hamlet of Esperance, or Kepa Kurl, on the coast of southwest Australia, a seven-hour drive from the nearest city, Perth. As a researcher studying how plastic pollution affects seabirds and the marine food web, Lavers finds a closeness with nature in such an isolated place, and has used that closeness in her collaborations with the local Aboriginal communities. “The birds sing during the day, the frogs at night and the kangaroos mow our lawn for us,” she says of her home. “It gives me the quiet life that I keep seeking, but also the opportunity to truly embed myself with the Aboriginal community.”
Lavers’ career trajectory is unusual, because she’s had to think creatively to build her life and do the work that she wants. Academics tend to move to urban institutions as they progress in their careers (E. Yan et al. Quant. Sci. Stud. 1, 1451–1467; 2020). Most career advice that PhD students receive is biased towards urban or suburban locations; indeed, most of their mentors have followed such paths themselves. But some PhD holders want to live in a place far from a research hub or a university town.
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In an academic job market that offers fewer and fewer stable positions, more science PhD holders are forging their own paths in the places where they want to live — whether that means launching a business or a non-profit organization or finding remote work. But doing so isn’t always easy. Small towns and rural areas can have fewer resources than cities do and can leave scientists feeling isolated and without mentorship. Still, the benefits in flexibility, community and autonomy are worth it, say trailblazers on an unusual path.
The most common reason that people interviewed by Nature’s careers team gave for living in such places was to be near family — many have parenting or caring responsibilities. People also valued a sense of place, living close to nature and the mental-health benefits of their autonomy and community. Some wanted to see their skills benefit the community in which they grew up or, like Lavers, wanted to live long term near field-research locations.
“I advise PhDs with extreme geographical restrictions to think broadly and widely about what they can do,” says Karen Kelsky, a career coach who founded the consultancy The Professor Is In. “It is becoming more normative to not work in academia.” Kelsky, who founded her business after leaving a tenured academic position, needed to stay in Eugene, Oregon, because she shared custody of her children with her ex-spouse. “I wish more academics would be entrepreneurial,” she says, noting that it’s been gratifying for her.
Solopreneurs and start-up firms
For PhD scientists living outside major research hubs who want to continue using their expertise, a common path is to start their own business, either as a consulting firm or as a freelancer. For instance, ecologist Reilly Dibner founded a science-animation and voice-over acting studio called Ecosystem Films in Laramie, Wyoming. “In creating my business, I found I knew a lot more about being an entrepreneur than I ever imagined, simply because I understood how to navigate the academic landscape. So many skills are transferable,” says Dibner. For example, academics know how to seek out and apply for funding, test ideas, quickly learn new skills and organize ambitious, long-term projects. “I understand discomfort and I know how to bust through work challenges,” Dibner adds. “And I have knowledge, resources and networks of people to tap into for their expertise.”
Reilly Dibner works on an animation project at her Ecosystem Films studio.Credit: Gregory Nickerson
To prepare for being self-employed, networking is key. Entrepreneurs say that their first work usually came from colleagues. Social scientist and writer Luis Alexis Rodríguez-Cruz, who runs a science-writing and research business from his hometown of Juana Díaz, Puerto Rico, says, “Networks of solidarity, trust and friendship expanded the opportunities that I use to build a life and a home.” Although some people interviewed by Nature began consulting part time before leaving a full-time position, many relied on a partner’s income or lived with family while getting their businesses off the ground.
Some business owners don’t want to just go solo; instead, they join forces to build a larger firm. Anna Ortega, co-founder and lead researcher of the Western Wildlife Research Collective, started a business because none of the conventional routes for PhD holders in wildlife biology seemed the right fit for her. She also wanted to move back to her home of Durango, Colorado, to raise her children near their grandparents. “I didn’t want to work for the federal government, I didn’t want to work for a state agency and I didn’t want to work in academia,” she says. “At the same time, I wanted to advance science.” Now, she and two team members do consulting work analysing wildlife data for academic laboratories, state and federal agencies and conservation non-profit organizations.
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Business owners such as Ortega must navigate the administrative and logistical load of setting up a small firm. Once a business is off the ground, such work can be outsourced, but at the start, the owner usually has to deal with the personnel and financial paperwork. Ortega read widely on business management as she was finishing her PhD and setting up her business.
Mark Crane, who splits his time between a small town on the edge of the Cotswolds region, UK, and the mountains of southern Spain, sees the ability to outsource this work as a boon. When he built his agricultural toxicology business, WCA Environment, in Faringdon, UK, in 2005, his team was fully remote. This meant that he could recruit the talent he wanted because he could pay specialists well to work from home. “We would win bids because we were cheaper. We had almost no overhead,” he says. “We contracted out everything that wasn’t scientific on an as-needed basis.” This strategy of recruiting the best talent and keeping overheads low allowed him to compete with much larger companies. In 2012, Crane sold the company back to his employees, giving him the funds necessary for developing his next project, a sustainable almond farm in Spain, and helping his wife to run her environmental consultancy.
Self-employed PhD scientists working far from research hubs must prevent becoming isolated from an academic community. Ortega says that starting a business with a friend has helped her to feel connected because they communicate weekly about their shared projects. She also goes to conferences often to meet colleagues and has company subscriptions to key journals to stay up to date with the literature.
Founding a non-profit organization
Scientists with mission-oriented research that has a low overhead can establish a non-profit organization. When Lavers found herself in a particularly difficult workplace situation after ten successful years in academia, she decided to strike out on her own. She started Adrift Lab, a research group focused on seabirds and marine plastics that collaborates with other scientists around the world. She founded Adrift Lab four years before she left her job at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia, so that she could transition to Esperance without disrupting her long-term data collection.
“The ivory tower makes you believe that the only way you can do real science is by being in academia,” says Lavers. “Our model demonstrates quite clearly that that is not a requirement.” Lavers and her two co-supervisors have seen nine master’s and four PhD students graduate over the course of six years in conjunction with the University of Tasmania, where one of her colleagues has a full-time position. The advantage of their model shows in their students’ success. “Most of our PhD students graduate with 5–7 publications as first author,” Lavers says. Lavers holds several part-time positions that allow her to stay involved in academic activities.
Jennifer Lavers and her colleagues set up an independent research group called Adrift Lab to study how plastic pollution affects marine and seabird lifeCredit: Blue The Film/Northern Pictures
Thinking about non-conventional funding is key, says Lavers. She and her colleagues have found that standard funding, such as grants from national funders, is harder to get as a principal investigator without a customary institutional affiliation. “We have survived because of the generosity of two philanthropists,” she says. “We have 20-year data sets, including the longest-running plastic-ingestion data set in the Southern Hemisphere. And yet we’ve never been successful with state or federal government funding.”
Lavers says that her relationship with the lab’s donors has been one of the surprising rewards of this non-profit work model. The philanthropists have come along on field excursions, gotten to know students and even been involved in data collection. “Those relationships have become long-lasting and really close in a way that you would never have with a government department. It builds that sense of community spirit within the lab. Funders get as much out of it as we do,” she says. And this funding model saves Lavers precious time. “I don’t spend weeks of every year writing these long reports that get sent off to the government,” says Lavers. “Instead, I divert that energy to writing papers, helping my students and doing all the things that actually matter.”
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The study of marine pollution is a rapidly evolving discipline, and Lavers can pivot quickly to pursue emerging issues in a way that government and university structures don’t allow. She also doesn’t have to fit her research into a department or research institution’s priorities and so can investigate interdisciplinary questions as she sees fit.
Lavers notes that establishing an independent lab was easier for her because she already knew how to run a conventional one. She understood the processes in her discipline and what it took to keep fieldwork and a lab running. Without that experience, she acknowledges, it would have been a lot tougher.
Lavers’ isolated locale isn’t for everyone. “The nearest major hospital is seven hours away,” she says. “We only have one tiny little airport. There are no major shopping malls or clothing stores or anything like that.” But, for Lavers, the upshot is that she lives a quiet, peaceful life close to nature.
