About me
Twenty-five years ago I started my career researching ceramic composites for the aerospace industry. Since then I have worked on ice cream, inhalers, oral solid dose pharmaceuticals, and consumer goods. The materials changed with each move. The underlying science did not.
What I did not expect was that careers behave the same way. The formal structure is rarely the whole story. The variables that determine whether a scientist thrives in industry, or plateaus inside it, follow patterns that are largely unwritten and almost never explained at the point of transition.
I spent most of my career inside those patterns before I had language for them. Over the past two years I have been mapping them. There are six. They show up in aerospace, food, pharmaceuticals, and consumer goods. They show up early-career and mid-career. They are structural, not personal, which means they can be named, understood, and addressed.
That framework now underpins the posts I write on LinkedIn, a '6 Patterns' diagnostic tool, and a book currently being written on scientific careers in industry.
The materials science consultancy continues. If you need cross-sector technical expertise in formulation, product development, or manufacturing, that work is described separately.
But if you are a postgraduate scientist figuring out why industry feels like a different game from the one you trained for, you are in the right place.

Our history
That cross-industry movement turned out to be the most useful thing about my career. Not because it made me a generalist, but because it forced me to rebuild my approach from first principles in each new sector. That process is where I first encountered the 6 Patterns this work is now about.
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