I have made the decision to leave academia for good. Throughout my career, I have always tried to optimise for actual, meaningful impact on the world. I believe this comes across very clearly in my writings, each piece of which takes me an excruciating amount of time and effort to produce (~two years each on average), but ultimately gets recorded as little more than just another publication within a university KPI system. My last four major pieces of work (all in Sports Medicine) essentially address what I believe to be the foundational problems in athletic injury science and research: • Definition: link.springer.com/article/10… • Prediction: link.springer.com/article/10… • Causality & Intervention: link.springer.com/article/10… • Muscle-tendon mechanics, particularly the mechanical behaviour of the hamstrings and its implications for injury: link.springer.com/article/10… For me, the intellectual groundwork is now largely complete. What matters now is actually solving the problem. I have come to recognise that academia, in its current form, is unlikely to provide me with the opportunity to do that. Over-administration means that progress is simply too slow, and throughout my academic career I have continually found myself overwhelmed by ever-increasing teaching demands and absurd KPI's that have nothing to do with doing meaningful science at all, leaving the critical work of actually having meaningful scientific impact on the world to be done around everything else. Accordingly, I have decided that for me to have a meaningful career in the way that I would like, I have to take a major risk and make a significant career pivot, as I want to spend the next phase of my life working directly on technologies and systems that can meaningfully change sport and healthcare, rather than chasing meaningless KPI's. For me, this is now clearly the more meaningful path that I have to take.