Within academia, the most prestigious research fields – which often therefore attract the best researchers – are often those that have the fewest practical applications. (A friend of mine has jokingly commented that a Fields Medal – the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in mathematics – indicates two things about the recipient: that they were capable of accomplishing something truly important, and that they didn’t.) If you are a top researcher and are willing to sacrifice some amount of status within academia, you can have considerable impact by moving into more applied areas of research.
