Ali Raza, medical director, Renovo, Manchester, UK

As a PhD student, Ali Raza made two choices that had profound effects on his career. First, he opted to pursue pharmaceutical development rather than academic research. Second, he decided that earning a medical degree would be the best pathway to that destination.

Those decisions were informed by experience and personal contact. While Raza was in graduate school, several exposures to the pharmaceutical industry taught him that an MD's voice often carries more authority in pharmaceutical research than a PhD's – even though a PhD may be more knowledgeable about a particular drug or disease mechanism. That information triggered the subsequent “ten-year diversion” into his medical training (see CV).

And while in medical school, Raza also weighed up the merits of being a practising physician versus being a pharmaceutical scientist. In seeing patients, the rewards are immediate, but are also limited to interacting with a few hundred patients a year. In the pharmaceutical industry, the rewards – a successful treatment for disease – are delayed, and even uncertain. But bringing a successful drug into the market could potentially touch millions, Raza says.

His strategy paid off. Raza says that his MD/PhD research background helped him to speed AstraZeneca's anti-cholesterol drug Crestor from initiation of clinical trials to approval in several countries within five years.

Now, he is looking forward to a new challenge in his old stamping ground of Manchester, where he trained as a biochemist. But there are new challenges for him: he will be working at a small biotech firm with under 100 employees and in an area – wound healing – where he has little experience.

But he is happy to have traded commuting between continents for a ten-mile drive to central Manchester. He jokes that he is pleased to be reunited with the city's curry mile – a row of Indian restaurants. And he hopes he can replicate his drug-industry success in the biotech sector in the city where his career began. “It would be fantastic to build a billion-dollar company in my home town,” Raza says.