IMPRS alumni meeting: careers beyond academia
IMPRS alumni shared diverse career paths beyond academia at a 2026 meeting, fostering networking and practical career insights.
The question that worries every PhD student no less than the results of an experiment: what comes next? How life is beyond academia? This question was the reason for over 40 people to gather in the Lecture Hall of MPI Halle on 26th of May 2026. Prof. Stuart Parkin opened the day, introducing the institute and the IMPRS programme. And then Jenny Davern, one of the three student representatives who had organised the event, introduced each of the six alumni, who carved their time out of jobs and lives to drive to Halle and spend a day talking to a roomful of PhD students about their own experiences and paths after the PhD.
Where they'd ended up covered a wide range. Kai-Uwe Demasius, who did his PhD in Stuart Parkin's group, after graduating founded SEMRON, a start-up building energy-efficient chips for AI. André Farinha spent years in the institute's 3D electronics group before moving to Abberior Instruments in Göttingen, where he now develops software to operate super-resolution microscopes. Christoph Hauser went from PhD to process engineer at ZEISS and has since moved into R&D, developing coatings and coating machines. Ankit Sharma took a postdoc year and then joined attocube in Munich as an Application Scientist in cryogenic microscopy. Konrad Gillmeister's path ran through product management at SONOTEC, a return to MLU Halle as a physics lab course head, six years in industrial metrology at Heraeus Comvance, and now group leader at the Deutsche Energie-Agentur working on Germany's energy transition. Berthold Rimmler defended in January 2024 and he was already at the Max Planck Society's VP office working on research strategy before the thesis was signed off.
After a catered lunch, where the first informal conversations started, two panel sessions chaired by Tobias Fäth and Torje Orlamünde followed. The first panel focused on the practical: how to get a job outside academia, and what start-up culture actually looks like from the inside. Second panel covered career motivation, work-life balance, what it means when family ties you to a particular city and the interesting job isn't there. "The second discussion was more philosophical, while the first one was rather pragmatic," said Tobias Fäth.
"Having shared the same PhD environment created a kind of common ground, making it easy to connect with them," one attendee noted. Another: "For the doctoral researchers, it is great to see what they are working on now, as they have exactly the same background as we have."
Conversations started easily even between people who'd never actually been here at the same time, as they had been through the same programme.
The day ended with an extended networking session. "The feedback from the attendees was overwhelmingly positive," said Jenny Davern. In the evening, she had organised a dinner at a riverside beer garden, and a group of students and alumni continued the conversation informally.
