Career Options and Areas of Specialization

As a student-driven program, there is a great deal of flexibility in the range and depth of course work and internship options. Students are expected to research career options and the skill sets they will need to be successful in those career paths.

The Bioscience Industry is not only growing rapidly, it is changing with the development of new technologies and business strategies. The program is designed to keep pace with these developments and, in fact, be part of creating new scientific and business strategies for successful new and established enterprises.

As students have completed internships and taken positions in industry, their feedback has been used to develop specific specialties that cross academic disciplines. The following is a partial list of defined specialties currently available.

Technology Transfer

The UA Office of Technology Transfer (OTT) assists faculty in matters related to intellectual property, including interactions with commercial partners, and brings inventions and discoveries developed within the University to market for the public good. Career opportunities include work with academic and research institutions.

Regulatory Affairs/Quality Assurance/Biosafety

Research and development of new drugs and devices alone will not ensure business success. A major factor in bringing a new idea to market in the medical sciences requires negotiation of the quality/safety/efficacy regulations to insure the public safety.

This specialty involves not only understanding, and being conversant in the underlying science, but also knowing the regulatory issues involved in the research, new drug/device applications, clinical trials, and manufacturing specifications. Career opportunities include research institutions, industry and governmental agencies.

Clinical Trials Management

No drug or device goes to market before an exhaustive suite of clinical trials. Drug and device companies can spend 12 to 15 years and up to $900 million to bring a product to market.

About 45 percent of this cost is accrued during the clinical trial phase. Managing the planning, recruitment, data collection, compliance issues and reporting of this complex, yet critical step requires an understanding of the science behind the drug or device, as well as statistical and project management expertise.

Career opportunities include research intitutions, pharmaceutical and device companies and clinical research organizations (CROs).

Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics is information science applied to biology to manage the vast amount of data being generated from sequence analysis. The Plant Sciences Department at the University of Arizona, has an active research program in bioinformatics. Career opportunities include research institutions and industry.

Controlled Environment Agriculture

Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) is defined as an integrated science and engineering based approach to provide specific environments for plant productivity while optimizing resources including water, energy, space, capital and labor. The CEAC's Vision is to develop Controlled Environment Agriculture as an economically, environmentally and socially sustainable agricultural option.

This specialty will provide students opportunities to learn the current status of high technologies used for greenhouse industries in U.S. and worldwide and to conduct problem- and mission-oriented projects that can benefit to the greenhouse and related industries in controlled environment agriculture. Students with engineering backgrounds as well as biology are well suited for this program.