Frida Polli began her career as an academic neuroscientist at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She loved the research she worked on, but soon realized she didn t want to be limited to producing data and writing papers. I wanted the fruits of our research to actually impact real people, says Polli.
At the same time, the neuroscientist was raising a daughter, Ellie, whom she gave birth to in 2005 while in grad school. She became a single parent a year later and was asking herself how she could sustain a career in academia simultaneously. As a postdoctoral fellow at a top-tier university then, you were basically making less than $40,000 a year, she explains. That is not a lot of money if you re living in an expensive city like Boston or New York.