Many things are specialty specific. In general however, this is a lot of talking about pipe dreams.
It would be great to split some time in either roles to generate a decent income while not burning out from research, or serving as a part-time consultant role in industry, or even having a non-tenure track academic position to keep up research collaborations at the university without having to constantly fight for grants to keep your job, etc. Just wanted to get insight on what career possibilities are on how to combine them all. What do you guys think?
Research is a 100% of the time endeavor. You don't get paid a "decent income" for doing a small amount of clinical work on top of research most of the time. You get paid a "decent income" for bringing in grants, and maybe something supplemental for the clinical effort. But you still have to be grant supported if you're doing serious research. That 1 day a week or 2 months a year of clinic is enough to keep you employed in academic medicine and keep your clinical skills up (in a pretty limited way), but not enough to make you decent money or keep the pressure off you for grants and thus keep you from "burning out". Any more clinical time than that and you're not doing serious research or you're totally burned out trying to keep up a serious lab and serious clinical practice.
Part-time consultant roles in industry are generally not well paid. You might do it to help get funding out of them for trying out their drugs/devices (with all those caveats) or get some small supplemental income. But "consulting" in pharma is not some big shot, high paying, part-time gig. i.e. you're not going to work 1 day a week at it and magically make $100k+/year for it.
If you're not bringing in the grants, you don't get the time to do research. So you either keep your job by working mostly clinically or by bringing in grants. You don't get to be clinical 50% of the time and research 50% of the time without grants. Maybe for a short period of time (like a startup phase), but that's not sustainable.
It's nice to know that you can go through different phases. I really enjoy the university setting and the collaborative research atmosphere. I don't want to spend most of my time writing grants and would love be co-PI on a few projects and teach students as well. Is there such a way to be part-time at a university (i.e. 2 days a week) and the remaining days be in community practice? That would be a really great financially and research-wise in my opinion. Have you guys seen anything like this? I wish our programs had seminars about this sort of thing...(or maybe it comes in residency I dunno)
To some limited extent you can go through different phases and transition around academics, private practice, industry. But you don't get to do it often.
In my line of work, industry opportunities for MDs are very limited and it doesn't pay well at all. In general, the opportunities for MDs in industry are very limited, hence why you hear little about it. You also have to give up the clinics if you go seriously into industry. Nobody is willing to do that because if you give up practice and your company or position goes away, then you have nothing to fall back on. So the MDs in industry tend to be from other countries and ineligible to practice in the USA, were booted out of medicine (unwilling/unable to practice clinically), or are older and financially secure enough that they have given up the clinics and are okay with that. This is a very, very small percentage of physicians overall. I have seen people work in industry and academics or private practice part-time, but not for any sustained period of time. It doesn't really help your academic portfolio and you don't make good money at it. Industry is used to paying PhD salaries except to the big business types at the top and academics doesn't want to pay you much (if anything) if you're clinical part-time.
Almost nobody is going to let you go out and practice in a private setting while you do research in academics. Some psychiatrists have done this. I doubt there are any other specialties that do it.
Co-PIs are either PIs with their own grants that contribute skills to another project or work mostly clinically and contribute something clinical like patients or samples. You don't get to latch onto someone else's grant and get time to do research funded by that other person who is doing all the writing. It doesn't work that way. If you want to do basic science research, you have to write the grants. You can do some clinical research after hours or on weekends without funding and teach for a reduced salary (which is what most of academics really is). That isn't what the MD/PhD training was for.
