Are federal funding cuts in the sciences getting you down? Don’t despair.
While academia remains competitive and funding-sensitive, healthcare and medicine careers are accelerating at a rapid pace, providing a plethora of jobs across an ever-widening range of skill sets and cross-disciplinary roles.
That is positive for our the VPhD community.
Let’s start off with some key trends for PhD-Level jobs across healthcare.
- • Strong demand in AI-integrated drug discovery, health informatics, and digital health
- • Growth in cross-disciplinary roles melding biomedical expertise with data/tech skills
- • Hiring momentum, especially in industry
- • Demand for public health, regulatory affairs, and digital integration globally
- • Emphasis on the increasing value of interdisciplinary and digital literacy for PhDs in medical and health sectors, offering career paths for both STEM and humanities grads.
For medical and health jobs that generally require a PhD (such as biomedical researchers, clinical scientists, public health researchers, and advanced roles in pharmaceuticals/biotech), current trends are directionally sound, with some new areas in play:
- • The life sciences sector (including pharma, biotech, genomics, regulatory affairs) reached record-high employment in 2024, but then slowed. Employers are expecting modest improvement in hiring by late 2025, with pockets of strong demand, especially in major US hubs like Massachusetts, which projects a 32% sector job growth by 2033.
- • PhD-level roles remain essential in drug research, gene therapy, regulatory affairs, and computational biology, but competition is intense—candidates with cross-disciplinary skills in AI, data science, and digital health are at a clear advantage.
- • Roles in epidemiology, health informatics, and data governance are growing, with PhD holders needed to lead projects involving large health datasets, AI/ML for population health, and digital health initiatives.
- • The rise in telehealth, personalized medicine platforms, and AI-driven health analytics creates new opportunities but requires PhDs with an understanding of both clinical context and advanced analytics/technology.
- • Global organizations, NGOs, and private sector employers are increasingly hiring PhDs for research, policy, and consulting, often favoring candidates who can manage digital tools and address health data privacy/ethics.
- • Computational Biology Engineer and AI Drug Discovery Lead: Integration of AI for drug design and data analysis.
- • Digital Health Integration Specialist: Connecting pharmaceutical products with hospital IT, electronic health records, and telehealth.
- • Sustainability and ESG Coordinators, Bioethics Advisors: Responding to increased demand for ethical guidance and sustainable practices in R&D.
As usual, our SmartJobs page has provide some examples of job listings today that reflect many of these areas and also illustrate increasing demand for multi-disciplinary knowledge and skills. We will have a deeper dive into several of these new careers paths in the coming months.
Take a look and join us, if you haven’t already.
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Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash