What’s the best way to change research fields? These three scientists have ideas

In science, careers are often imagined as linear: a direct path from school to degree, PhD to postdoc, and onwards to the inevitable professorship or industry role. In reality, research rarely moves in straight lines — and neither do successful researchers.

The dynamism of science is driven by researchers’ willingness to pursue fresh avenues. One study, published in 2025, analysed the career trajectories of 1.4 million scientists¹. It found that topic switching — the process of pivoting to various research areas during a career — was linked to innovation. “Researchers who switch topics more frequently are more likely to challenge existing paradigms, introduce novel ideas and integrate diverse perspectives, thereby accelerating the evolution of scientific knowledge,” says Alex Yang, an informatician at Nanjing University in China, in the paper, adding: “This highlights topic-switching as a vital mechanism for creative breakthroughs and the diversification of research landscapes.”

But can researchers pivot too much, and when is the right time in a career to do so? A 2019 study found that moving between topics too frequently at the early-career stage might be detrimental to a scientist’s productivity, defined as the number of papers that they publish, although this trend is inverted in later career stages². Furthermore, scientists who switched topics received fewer citations at all career stages than did those who stayed in the same field.

Overall, topic switching has been on the rise since 2000, says Yang, suggesting that interdisciplinary careers are gaining favour. This might be because of the rising complexity of scientific challenges across fields such as climate science, artificial intelligence and biomedical research, which are increasingly requiring broader collaboration.

Nature’s careers team has gathered lessons from your boss — or, at least, someone else’s boss — on not only why pivots matter, but also how to make them work. Whether you’re contemplating a shift, recovering from a setback or are simply curious, here is some practical advice from three leaders in UK science on where to leap, how to land and why winding paths are often where breakthroughs lie (see ‘The highlights’).

MARY COLLINS: Remember, you’ll be doing this job day in, day out

Director of the Blizard Institute — a medical-research institute at Queen Mary University of London.

Before moving to the Blizard Institute in 2022, I spent six years as the provost at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, a private, interdisciplinary graduate school in Japan offering research positions in everything from mathematics to ecology. There, researchers learnt about how other scientists worked. There was work on experimental physics, synthetic chemistry and marine biology, all in the same institute. That was powerful.

When contemplating a pivot, it’s important to understand how a completely different field works and thinks. You can’t just jump in and hope to work it out as you go. Wishful thinking is all well and good, but the day-to-day of a job can often be very different from how you imagined it. Think about yourself in that new field: what will an average day look like? Make sure that you are going to enjoy it from day one, if possible. The best way to do this is to spend some time in that discipline before switching careers. Researchers could consider a secondment, if possible, or a travelling fellowship.

It can also be helpful to work out what general question you want to explore. Find people tackling that subject from various angles, talk to them and find out what the necessary skill set is for that role. Networks can be found through universities, societies and scientific meetings.

However, it’s also important to know your limits and to be realistic about the fields in which your skill set can be useful. Don’t plan on a job modelling climate change, just to find out that you don’t have the skills for it. Don’t dream of solving ocean plastics pollution through chemical approaches, when you don’t have sufficient experience in chemistry.

Nonetheless, a cross-disciplinary background has huge benefits. It makes researchers resilient. It also means that they can set up cross-disciplinary research groups later in their careers and supervise people in different disciplines who are working together, which is ideal for tackling broad and complex scientific problems. There are few people who can do that confidently.

PAUL NURSE: Understand the institution you’re applying to

Nobel Laureate and founding director of the Francis Crick Institute in London, one of Europe’s largest biomedical research centres.

I’ve used yeast to study the cell cycle since the early days of my career in the 1970s — and continue to do so today. My postdoctoral research focused on the cdc2 gene in Schizosaccharomyces pombe and its control over the progression of the cell cycle.

For nearly a decade after earning my PhD, I struggled to find permanent positions and was funded by temporary, external grants for much of it. Although people respected what I was doing, institutions tended to recruit people in well-established or trendy fields. Yeast and the cell cycle became a hot topic years later, but at the time, the power of yeast as a model for understanding eukaryotes was underestimated.

I quickly realized that the way the majority of academic institutions work is conservative. Many institutes — especially small ones — end up narrowing their focus, leaving them ossified and lacking in flexibility in who they employ and what research they engage in. Universities are also understandably constrained by teaching responsibilities; they might need to hire a cell biologist to teach a required module, for instance, and such considerations shape their hiring practices. Since recognizing these structural limitations, whenever I’ve been on hiring committees, I’ve tried to look over the horizon and consider people who are not necessarily in the mainstream, because their field could be the mainstream in the future.

Large institutes tend to have the turnover and breadth to be more agile than small institutes, and have the latitude to allow researchers to work across a range of disciplines or more cutting-edge topics. Some adopt what we call the best-athlete approach, which is focusing on attracting any exceptional talent, rather than recruiting people in specific fields. At the Francis Crick Institute, this approach enables 80–90% of job postings to be open calls — for the best researcher across a wide breadth of disciplines.

My advice for anyone planning to pivot research disciplines is to look carefully at the institution that you’re applying to and the way in which they search for candidates and do interviews, because that will give you a good indication of how they approach research. The culture and size of an institution can greatly change how well-suited it might be for interdisciplinary work.

JENNY READ: There has never been a better time to break the mould

Programme director for robotics at the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) — a UK government-funded body focused on high-risk, high-reward research and development.