Scientists Are Leaving Academia for Industry, Here’s Why It’s Happening Now

Scientists are leaving academia at record rates, trading tenure-track dreams for the speed and flexibility of industry. In fields from physics to planetary science, the draw isn’t just higher pay — it’s the freedom to pursue bold ideas without the bottlenecks of publishing cycles, grant proposals, and institutional politics. For Dr. Elizabeth Frank, once a postdoctoral researcher mapping Mercury’s surface, the shift meant swapping the slow grind of academic milestones for the rapid, interdisciplinary problem-solving of space startups — and using AI to breathe new life into data gathered half a century ago.

On paper, Dr. Elizabeth Frank had made it. As a postdoctoral researcher at the Carnegie Institute of Science, she was part of MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging), the late 2000s mission to Mercury. She spent her days analyzing flashes of X-rays to determine the composition of Mercury's Sun-bombarded surface — the kind of work she had once dreamed about. 

But something was missing.

Elizabeth Frank, PhD (Credit: Colliding Worlds)

“I was a scientist on an active mission, getting data from the X-ray spectrometer, making maps out of the data,” she recalls. “And I thought, ‘I'm doing the thing that I worked so hard for, but I don't feel fulfilled.’” 

The gap between the prestige of the work and the lack of personal meaning pushed Frank toward a different path, stepping beyond the gates of academia and institutional research to a faster-moving world in industry, where she would become the Chief Scientist at the lunar helium-3 mining company Interlune. In industry, freed from the constraints of publishing papers and tenure reviews, she has embraced faster turnaround times, iterative design, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Frank is now using AI to close the gap between academic discovery and commercial innovation to unlock lunar secrets buried in half-century-old data.

Elizabeth Frank’s path from academia to industry science

Frank’s enthusiasm for research started with a second-place prize at her high school science fair. She attempted to duplicate the Miller-Urey experiment, a foundational study proving that organic molecules, the origins of life, could be synthesized from a simple mixture of gases and an electric spark.

At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Frank built her own interdisciplinary science major with a concentration in astrobiology, spending summers analyzing dusty molecular clouds at the SETI Institute and studying rocky meteorite chemistry at the Lunar Planetary Institute. Both internships affirmed her new goal of becoming a planetary scientist.  

As a graduate teaching assistant at University of Colorado, Boulder, Frank quickly discovered that lecturing wasn’t for her and decided to focus on research positions, landing a postdoctoral role with the MESSENGER mission for its final six months in orbit.

A depiction of the MESSENGER spacecraft flying over Mercury's surface. (Credit: Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington)

By measuring the energy contained within an X-ray flash or fast-moving neutrons, Frank and the X-ray and Gamma-Ray and Neutron Spectrometer (XRS; GRNS) teams could determine which elements were present in the top layer of Mercury’s crust. MESSENGER’s spectrometers took thousands of measurements, building up a detailed map showing the composition of Mercury’s surface from smooth volcanic plains to ancient impact craters.

While reanalyzing data for a Nature Geoscience paper on the discovery of graphite in Mercury’s large impact craters, Frank discovered an error in a reported value and brought her concerns to her advisor. To her shock, her advisor told her to leave the incorrect number unchanged. 

“That cued this existential crisis,” recalls Frank. “If I make a mistake and we don't have to correct it, what's the point? How does my work get used and how does it contribute to anything? Does anything I do matter?”

Success Beyond the Lab 

In 2016, Frank left academia for a geospatial analyst role at asteroid mining startup, Planetary Resources. Within a year she was the Director of Data Products. The pace was faster, the collaboration more interdisciplinary, and her work wasn’t judged by publication count.   

“No one tells you how to take your degree in planetary science and get a job outside of academia,” says Frank. “In industry, I could move at a faster pace, work closely with teams, and not have research papers be my work product.”

Over the next nine years, Frank directed and led planetary science operations at multiple space startups. Today, as Chief Scientist at Interlune, she’s focused on an ambitious goal: mining the Moon for helium-3, a rare isotope embedded in lunar soil that could one day fuel fusion reactors.

That leap from academia into industry required more than subject-matter expertise. “When it comes to being a professor or the principal investigator of a lab, you’re not trained in budgeting or planning,” Frank explains. “In industry, there are people who specialize in project management, engineering support, and accounting.” Learning to work alongside those specialists not only freed her to focus more deeply on the science, it also exposed her to the scale and coordination required for large technical projects.

Working with specialists has allowed Frank to broaden her expertise and explore fields ranging from spacecraft systems engineering to business development. In doing so, she has become a  bridge between academics interested in low-cost space missions and aerospace engineers unfamiliar with astronomical concepts. More recently, she has applied AI to connect past academic research with the future of lunar mining, closing the loop between 20th-century exploration and 21st-century innovation.

How AI is Reviving 50-Year-Old Moon Mission Findings 

Between 1969 and 1972, Apollo astronauts collected over 300 kilograms of lunar regolith, a top layer of loose rock on the Moon’s surface. High-energy radiation from fast-moving plasma in the solar wind strikes the rocky soil, implanting volatiles, helium ions, and the stable isotope, helium-3, into the rubble. 

Subsequent studies revealed that the highest concentration of helium-3 was found in the oldest, smallest, and most titanium-rich rock fragments. On the Moon, constant micrometeorite impacts churn the regolith, exposing older, fine-grained particles to the surface where they can be mined for helium-3.  

Estimated concentration of 3 He (parts per billion by mass) in the lunar regolith: (a) nearside; (b) farside. (Credit: Ian Crawford, Lunar Resources: A Review, DOI: 10.1177/0309133314567585)

However, many of the scientific results obtained from the Apollo samples are trapped in physical papers, rendered only in ink. Frank can look at the measurements with digital scans, but replotting the data seemed impossible. The original histogram is difficult to read with no grid to aid in estimating the values for each bar.

So Frank turned to AI. Using Google’s Gemini to extract data from a 1970s bar chart and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to transform it into a rebinned histogram, she quickly generated new plots showing the distribution of grain sizes on the lunar surface most likely to yield helium-3. Each iteration produced clean, well-commented Python code she could reuse on similar datasets.

“What would have taken me a couple of hours in a spreadsheet or even longer coding took me less than 10 minutes,” she says. “For me, the output is more important than the process of coding. These models provide a way of digitizing old data sets.”

Science Without Gatekeepers

From mapping Mercury’s crust to determining the optimal grain size for lunar helium-3 mining, Frank’s path reflects a growing shift: scientists leaving academia not to abandon research, but to pursue it on their own terms.

For Dr. Elizabeth Frank, leaving academia wasn’t abandoning science, it was reclaiming it. The shift to industry gave her the freedom to chase questions that matter to her, at the pace the work demands, while forging collaborations across engineering, business, and AI. 

Her journey mirrors a growing movement in which scientists are redefining what it means to do “serious” research outside of the campus gates. In that sense, the question isn’t whether industry can replace academia, it’s how the two can strengthen the bridge between them so the next generation of scientists has the tools, the partners, and the freedom to push human knowledge further than either could alone.

Bryné Hadnott is a planetary scientist turned freelance science communicator based in Oakland, CA. Their work has appeared in Physics Today, The Planetary Society, and Stanford University’s Kavli Institute of Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. Follow them on LinkedIn.