Career changes are often described as fresh starts, but that can be misleading. Most people do not leave everything behind when they move into a new field, take on a different role, or build something of their own. They carry years of judgment, habits, mistakes, relationships, and experience with them.
Philip Ashton-Rickardt’s career is a good example of how that works.
He spent decades in academic science before moving into biotech entrepreneurship and research leadership. On paper, the shift from professor to company founder may look dramatic. In practice, many of the skills that helped him build an academic career became useful in a completely different setting.
Learning to Find the Next Step
Ashton-Rickardt grew up in a working-class family in the UK and did not have a predetermined route into science.
He studied at King’s College London before earning his PhD in Molecular Immunology from the University of Edinburgh. He later moved to the United States for postdoctoral research at MIT and went on to hold academic positions at the University of Chicago and Imperial College London.
Those years gave him deep scientific training, but they also taught him something broader: how to move forward without having every step mapped out in advance.
“I had to chart my own progress through college to an academic career,” Ashton-Rickardt has said. “This prepared me well for being a company starter.”
That connection matters because starting a company often requires the same comfort with uncertainty. There may be a scientific idea, an early team, and a problem worth solving, but there is rarely a complete set of instructions.
Leaving a Career You Already Understand
By 2017, Ashton-Rickardt had already built a long academic career. He had been a professor at the University of Chicago and later served as Chair and Professor at Imperial College London.
Walking away from a familiar environment at that stage could easily have felt like losing momentum. Instead, he returned to Boston and founded Smith Therapeutics, which worked on engineered cell therapies for neurodegenerative diseases.
The move was not a rejection of his academic background. It was another use for it.
Years spent asking scientific questions, leading research groups, reviewing evidence, and adjusting hypotheses became useful in an environment where scientific ideas also had to become real programmes, teams, and companies.
This is one reason career changes can be more complicated than the phrase “starting over” suggests. You may be new to the setting, but you are not new to the underlying skills.
Curiosity Travels Well
One quality Ashton-Rickardt has carried across nearly every stage of his career is curiosity.
After Smith Therapeutics, his work included senior scientific roles at AZTherapies and Sigilon Therapeutics. Following Eli Lilly’s acquisition of Sigilon in 2023, he later worked with Flagship Pioneering as a Senior Scientific Advisor and continued building new biotech ventures.
He is now a co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Halyard Therapeutics and serves as Managing Director and Chief Scientific Officer at BE Therapeutics.
The organisations have changed, but the central questions have remained familiar. How can a new scientific idea become useful? What evidence matters most? When should a team keep pushing, and when should it change direction?
Those questions require technical expertise, but they also require a willingness to keep learning.
Ashton-Rickardt has described continued growth simply as “always learn,” and that idea may be more important during career transitions than at any other time. Experience helps, but experience can also become restrictive if it turns into the belief that old methods are the only methods.
Experience Without Rigidity
There is a difference between using experience and being trapped by it.
Someone who has worked in one field for decades can bring valuable judgment into a new role, but only if they remain flexible enough to question their assumptions. Ashton-Rickardt sees resilience, flexibility, hard work, and curiosity as some of the most important qualities behind long-term progress.
That mix is particularly relevant in biotech, where promising ideas regularly change as new evidence appears.
The same principle applies more broadly. Changing direction does not mean discarding everything that came before. It can mean taking what still works, leaving behind what no longer fits, and becoming willing to learn the rest.
Building a Career With Your Own Standards
Ashton-Rickardt’s career has taken him through universities, startups, established biotech companies, investment environments, and executive scientific leadership.
That range has also shaped how he measures progress.
“I have my own standards,” he has said when discussing success.
For him, those standards include authenticity, learning, family, and trying to create something new and important. They are not tied to one job title or one institution, which makes them easier to carry through periods of change.
That may be one of the most useful lessons from a career built across very different environments. Reinvention does not always require becoming a completely different person.
Sometimes the strongest next chapter begins by recognising which parts of your experience are worth bringing with you.
