Mechanical + electrical engineering graduate who likes research and whose goal is to maximize impact. To this end, I am currently deciding between two career paths:

• Become a professor / researcher who spends their career identifying, tackling, and pivoting between neglected scientific problems that are not among 80,000 Hours' main recommended paths (e.g., advanced manufacturing, alternative energy storage, cryptography, etc.).
• Take a higher-paying career with decent work-life balance (say, ML engineer earning $400k / yr) and donate around $100k/year to support researchers working on cause areas that EA generally considers most important (e.g., biosecurity, AI policy, animal welfare).

Note: Though I want to tackle and pivot between neglected scientific problems through research,  I'm not interested in the major EA cause areas at the moment, nor do I expect to be in the near future. Also, I would care a lot about WLB if I went the non-researcher route, so taking on a higher paying career would not be an option in that case.

Any resources or thoughts that one should keep in mind when comparing the two career paths?

One way I've tried to think about it is whether I could earn and donate enough to "replace" the impact I might have had as a researcher. After all, $100k / yr is probably enough to fund an additional PhD student, but there are other factors to consider (funded student may not become a professor / work on neglected problems for instance). More importantly, this way of thinking doesn't seem quite right, since the funded researcher would not be a direct replacement for me -- the tradeoff seems closer to:

• Contributing directly to a potentially neglected but non-EA-priority field, versus
• Helping fund one additional researcher working in a major EA cause area

TL;DR: If anybody has any resources or insights, would deeply appreciate hearing them.