Being a professor involves a lot more than teaching classes, and University of Utah biomedical engineering professor Robert Hitchcock has learned that firsthand since leaving industry to join the U in 2006.
Hitchcock teaches, researches, handles administrative tasks, serves on multiple committees and on top of that he pursues other entrepreneurial activities. While there’s a lot on his plate, Hitchcock said that the most important part of his job is developing his students.
“If I can help train people how to observe the world, how to identify problems, how to solve those problems in an ethically, morally, environmentally responsible way, then I feel like my efforts have been increased many, many fold,” he said. “Although at times this feels like a business with revenue and expenses and milestones and management challenges, at the end of the day, it's a university and a university is here to train students, create new knowledge and, in our case, also help patients.”
In Hitchcock’s lab, undergraduate and graduate students have helped develop medical devices across multiple fields, including OBGYN, orthopaedics, cardiac surgery and more. Hitchcock has collaborated with physicians on everything from an intra-abdominal pressure sensor to an underfoot load monitoring system. “I'm just sort of a utility engineer, but my success is really incumbent on working with physicians. They can tell me what they need, and I can help develop it.”
This approach “makes my students much more attractive to industry for them to hire. The students who graduate from my lab all get jobs immediately, and they love it,” Hitchcock said. On the other hand, he described it as an unconventional way to run an academic lab. “While there have been a lot of successes in terms of intellectual property and publications, it's really harder to get the people at the review panels to value what you're doing, because they're all very channel specific sort of scientists.”
Transitions
Hitchcock entered the realm of academia after years of working for large and mid-sized companies developing products. When he became a professor, he said it was a huge change. “At first, it was just ‘What the heck am I doing? What am I supposed to be doing next?’”
However, being involved in commercialization and developing intellectual property while at the U was never a question for Hitchcock. In fact, his work history and background developing medical devices resulted in one of his greatest and longest lasting collaborations.
Shortly after he started at the U, a new urogynecologist, Ingrid Nygaard, came to his department chair looking for help with a project, and the chair connected her with Hitchcock because of his experience in industry. The two have now been working together for almost 15 years.
During his time at the U, Hitchcock also cofounded a company in 2008 and helped lead it to a successful acquisition in 2017.
Now Hitchcock is preparing for another transition: retirement—a process that is more complicated in academia than other industries. Rather than just announcing a retirement date and leaving, professors need to tie up a lot of loose ends. This means they stop hiring new graduate students or sign onto new grants as a principal investigator. “As soon as I write a grant and hire graduates, that’s a five-year commitment.”
As he ties up these loose ends, Hitchcock has some advice for younger colleagues:
- Learn to say no. “It’s flattering to be wanted. It’s not flattering to be overwhelmed,” he said.
- Find the right partners “who can share in the equitable distribution of work.”
- Keep your mind open to new ideas. “Don't fall in love with your ideas because they're probably not that good. Somebody else has probably already had them, and there's another idea right around the corner.”
- Rely only on yourself and close collaborators to accomplish tasks. “Everybody else has a job to do, and they're going to do whatever they need to do to get that job done and not necessarily keep your interests in mind.”
