About
Don Back, PhD, MBA
Scientist by training. More than four decades at the intersection of science and the world of work. Founder of PhD Career Academy.
All I wanted to be was a scientist
Not just someone who studied science. Someone who did it. Someone who pushed at the boundaries of what was known, who spent days in the lab chasing questions that hadn’t been answered yet.
That conviction carried me through a BSc, a PhD, postdoctoral research in the United States, and back to Canada for a faculty position. I was living exactly the life I had planned.
Until two things happened.
The first disruption
An economic downturn interrupted my pursuit of a national scholarship. I didn’t get it. I reapplied, and won one of very few available in the next competition.
I should have felt relieved. Instead, I felt something I didn’t expect: a question I couldn’t dismiss. Was this the signal to look elsewhere?
The second disruption
I stayed. And I discovered that the life of a faculty member is very different from the life of a postdoctoral researcher.
Teaching, chasing grants, administration. I love teaching. But the rest of it wasn’t the science life I had imagined. I was almost never in the lab. The work I had spent years training for was not the work I was actually doing.
I wanted out.
The part nobody talks about
What followed was one of the most isolating experiences of my professional life.
My faculty colleagues couldn’t have the conversation with me. Some saw my wish to leave as turning my back on academia. Others saw it as failure. A few couldn’t engage at all, because my doubt reflected their own unspoken fears back at them.
I felt like a black sheep. The alienation was real, and at times almost suffocating.
I didn’t have a coach. I didn’t have a framework. I didn’t have anyone who had made the same journey and could tell me what it looked like on the other side.
I figured it out anyway. But it was harder than it needed to be.
“People in academia often ask if I miss the science. The truth is that I’ve dealt daily with more science and technology since leaving than I ever did as a faculty member.”
More than four decades at the intersection of science and the world of work
Since 1985, my career has taken me to places I couldn’t have anticipated from inside a faculty office:
- Managing Partner of two venture capital funds, Keystone Technologies and Western Life Sciences Venture Funds, funding and building more than two dozen companies
- Vice President of a large innovation agency, managing research teams and fostering scientific advancement
- Founder of my own company in 2003, now in its 24th year: helping to fund and build six research and technology centres, including Tecterra and Biovantage as consultant and contract executive; optimizing cancer clinical trials organizations; and coaching early-stage companies through growth
- Executive Director of GO Productivity, a lean six sigma productivity improvement organization, where I built a $5M Advanced Services and Manufacturing Innovation Centre with four industry partners, who contributed a further $25M to projects in automation, logistics, industrial IoT and advanced sensors
- Built the curriculum for a three-year biotechnology training program
- Co-Chair of the board of the Northern Alberta Business Incubator (NABI)
Across all of it, I worked at the interface of science and the world of work: translating the jargon of each to the other, building teams, hiring and advancing PhD graduates, and watching patterns repeat.
What I kept seeing
The most consistent pattern across four decades wasn’t about industry, sector or discipline. It was about what happens to exceptionally capable people when they try to move from doctoral training into professional roles outside academia.
They struggled far more than they should have. Not because they lacked intelligence or capability. Not even because they lacked skills. But because the conditions that make career strategies work, clarity of direction, a stable professional identity, and freedom from fear-driven decisions, were rarely in place before the strategy was introduced.
The Outer Game was being played before the Inner Game was resolved. And when strategies failed under those conditions, the failure was almost always blamed on the individual, not on the sequence.
I’ve set out the whole argument, and what it means for individuals and for institutions, in There is a better way.
The Career Decision Canon
Over time, I formalized these recurring patterns into a body of work I call the Career Decision Canon.
The Canon is not a coaching methodology or a self-help framework. It is a set of six observed, testable laws that explain why PhD career transitions succeed or fail, whatever the discipline, the industry or the individual’s level of effort. The laws don’t prescribe tactics. They explain constraints, and once the constraints are visible, the right strategy becomes clear.
The Nine Foundational Job Search Elements put the Canon into practice in three stages. The Career Claimers Index™ shows where each person stands, on two dimensions: Professional Agency and Academic Attachment. Together, they are the foundation of everything I do with clients.
On a personal note
You can take the scientist out of the lab. You cannot take the lab out of the scientist.
I am an avid naturalist. On most mornings you are likely to find me outdoors before the rest of the world is awake, walking and photographing coyotes, birds and the other wonders of a world that has never stopped being interesting. My curiosity about science and nature never left. It just found more places to go.
