Nathan Neff-Mallon attended undergrad at Whitman College, where he studied Chemistry and did research with Mark Juhaz working with carboranes. He then attended UW-Madison, where he worked in John Wright's lab developing IR-Visible non-linear spectroscopy for applications in bio-inorganic complexes, with most of his time spent writing software in Python. After leaving graduate school with an M.S., Nathan started working in data analytics and machine learning, including for Madison-based mobile game company PerBlue. Currently, Nathan works writing quantum computer control and tuning software at Infleqtion.

Career Alchemy: One Chemist’s Journey Through a Chemical-Free Career

The ACS estimates that only 30% of chemists work in academic settings and many chemistry majors leave the field of chemistry altogether. It can be unclear how to navigate the non-academic career landscape. In this talk, I will provide an overview of my own career path, share reflections on graduate school and job hunting, and discovering what work I wanted to do. I will discuss my experience working as an analyst and tech at a very small company (Extract Systems), a data analyst at a a mid-sized video game studio (PerBlue Entertainment), and as a software engineer at a rapidly growing quantum technology manufacturing company (Infleqtion).