CYGNA – Women in Academia Network’s main objective is to promote interaction among female academics and to provide a forum for learning, support, and networking. As such, through its activities, CYGNA aims to generate conversations about how we can collectively rethink academia and academic work to make it more inclusive and to guarantee a greater and more positive impact on the academic community itself as well as on the firms and societal actors we study. For this reason, this year’s 50th anniversary conference theme of “Rethinking IB research for the next 50 years” makes EIBA the ideal space to celebrate CYGNA’s 10th anniversary with a panel discussing these issues. The proposed panel seeks to stimulate a conversation about how academics can leverage the learning from the “real-life experiences of scholars” (Jones & Bartunek, 2021, p. 335), in particular around their career transitions (e.g. cross-border transitions, leadership transitions and transitions from industry to academia), to make IB scholarship more interesting, more relevant and more transformative.