Careers in science

From academia to industry

Pooja Jain, technical leader at Altran, part of the Capgemini Group, is one of many within the Capgemini family who have made the decision to move from academia into industry, bringing their specialist technical knowledge with them. 
 
After finishing her bachelor’s degree, she went on to complete a Master’s in electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, one of the leading technical centers in India. A few years later, she returned to IIT to complete a PhD concentrating on speech signal processing. 

Pooja believes this academic training has been an essential foundation for the projects she is currently working on. “All my research articles have been in the area of signal processing, and wireless communication was my Master’s major. This is the exact focus of my work today, including the design and development of features for physical layer in advanced wireless communication technologies, and 4G long-term evolution (LTE) and Narrowband Internet-of-Things (NB-IoT).”

Journey into space

Sandrine Daniel, head of the scientific office at Capgemini France, took a similar decision. Today, she leads a group of experts who specialize in Earth observation and artificial intelligence. 
 
For Sandrine, her passion for the space sector began soon after university. “It all started when I took a work placement at the German space agency. There, I discovered the field of satellite imaging and radar sensing. I was so inspired that I took a PhD at the IETR Laboratory in Rennes, focusing on radar analysis.” 

New ways of working

Transitioning to Capgemini offered Sandrine new perspectives, opportunities and ways of working. “I found the industrial sector to be more structured than academia,” she says. “It helped me to be more organized and efficient.”

This is an experience that Pooja can relate to. “Although I’d worked in wireless industry prior to my PhD, I came across architecture and tools that were new to me in my project at Altran, such as embedded architecture deploying multi-core digital signal processors (DSP), and Git tools for software version control. It required some extra hours and dedication to learn about these novel concepts and tools, before I could make a meaningful contribution to the final product.”

Pooja and Sandrine, in their different ways, feel they are contributing to an important cause with their work at Capgemini.

“I see my work as defining the rate at which data is communicated, as well as the availability of network coverage in basements or when travelling at high speed. It’s about the way humans and machines interact in modern society,” says Pooja. “We’re also building the foundation for the next generation of technologies such as 6G and open radio access network (O-RAN).”

Sandrine explains how she is working on a new algorithm to help classify crop fields, which represents a continuation of her PhD. “By using satellite images to classify crops, we can make land use more efficient and accurately predict crop yields. This can have a major impact on climate-change policies.”