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There’s more than one way to build a career in science.

Academic careers are often considered to be the top job for many PhD graduates, but not for Dr. Tracy Lohr, PhD’14.

Now a senior research scientist at Shell, Lohr will return to the University of Calgary on Feb. 26 and 27 to deliver the ’s third annual . 

During her visit, she will meet with current students to offer career advice and discuss differences found between academia and industry.

An early love for chemistry

Lohr’s journey began with a Bachelor of Science from the University of Victoria.

“I planned to major in biology, but I enjoyed my first-year chemistry courses more, since you got to solve problems by applying the fundamentals you learn in class,” she says.

As part of her undergraduate studies, Lohr participated in a co-op experience at in Calgary, which is how she met her PhD supervisor, .

“I was considering graduate school and Warren had supervised my mentor at Nova. He helped set up an interview, and I decided that I wanted to do my PhD at UCalgary,” she recalls.

“It took a while to figure out some technical problems in my PhD. When everything finally started to click, I would say that’s the highlight, since I had so much personal growth and development as a scientist over that period.”

From academia to industry

Lohr began her career at Northwestern University, first as a postdoctoral scholar and later as an assistant research professor, studying polymers and catalysts. However, she grew curious about a career change after contacts at Shell reached out to her.

“As an academic, opportunities to work at the industrial scale are limited,” she says, “If I joined Shell to work on catalyst projects, then I would get to not only invent them, but help scale up and deploy new products. That really excited me.”

The mindset you adopt while working in industry also changes, Lohr notes.

“In industry, it doesn’t matter if your material performs well on the benchtop," she says. "If you can’t put it in a plant and make huge batches of it, it can never be functional.”

Lohr recounts a highlight of her career with Shell.

“I invented a new catalyst, and they invited me to watch the first scaled reaction at the plant,” she says. “They installed the catalyst and brought me to see the whole thing start up.

“That was probably the most exciting, nerve-wracking and rewarding experience that I’ve had. It’s a feeling that’s hard to beat.”

Let yourself learn and expand your skillset

Lohr has three pieces of advice to students, regardless of discipline: Don’t shy away from tough problems; learn new things and expand your skillset; and — perhaps most importantly — learn to work with people.

“There's this notion of the ‘lone genius scientist,’ but in industry, if you ever expect to deploy your technology, you have a huge team of people with different skillsets," she says.

“Sure, I invented the catalyst, but there’s a team operating the reactors. We have finance and legal teams identifying buyers and working on the IP. There are manufacturing engineers working on scale-up. I’m working with all of them. The operations are way bigger than you think.”

Lohr’s talk, Shell’s Ethylene Oxide Story: History, Delplots, and the Future, will be hosted in EEEL 161 on Friday, Feb. 27 at 2 p.m. Registration is not required to attend. Please contact Warren Piers (wpiers@ucalgary.ca) for more information.