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| Action figure picture from here. |
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| Source material: Harvard CCB Corporate Recruiting |
He wanted a challenging but rewarding career and thought corporate recruiting might fit the bill. He talked to a friend who worked at Aerotek, learned about the company, and liked both the company culture and the people with whom he would be working.
While most people don't move from a lab into sales, it worked for Paul. He says, "One of the most important things you need to work in this field is a knowledge of skill sets and the industry that you're serving; and having spent some time working in the laboratory means I really understand what my clients are looking for. Understanding what the client needs and what type of person they are looking for, and then being able to explain that to non-technically minded people -- recruiters and HR managers -- is vital."As someone who is on the periphery of the field, I'd think that would be fun. Not as fun as chemistry, of course, but it must be very rewarding in its own way.
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| Modified version of an IUCR.org graph |
Controlling the crystallization pressure is essential for both purification by crystallization and for efficient operations on scale. By adjusting solution conditions to decrease the solubility of the product within the metastable zone, the desired molecules can be pressured to come out of solution and crystallize. Gradual cooling without seeding leads to one nucleation event and the formation of relatively small crystals. Slowly applying the crystallization pressure can produce large crystals, depending on the size and number of seeds. If the crystallization pressure is too great, supersaturation occurs and molecules may be forced out of solution too quickly as small crystalline solids, noncrystalline precipitates, oil.There's a very tricky dance in a good crystallization -- you don't want a solution, you don't want a precipitate. You want a long residence in the metastable zone with not too many nucleations (too many nucleations = small crystals.) You want to slowly increase crystallization pressure by lowering the temperature or by adding an anti-solvent. Too fast, and you're going to precipitate and possibly oil out a great deal of product.
PhD in Chemistry with an emphasis in Natural Products, Pharmacognosy, or a closely related field, required. Minimum of 15 / 20 years of hands-on research experience in the operation, experimental design and interpretation of data from GC, HPLC, GC/MS, and HPLC/MS instrumentation required. Minimum of 5 years of phytochemistry research experience required. Experience with and extensive knowledge regarding the isolation, identification and quantitation of flavor and aroma compounds, secondary plant metabolites and bioactive compounds.I know it's an old Chemjobber saw by now, but really -- you could get every single candidate that fits these requirements in a small hotel conference room. Why not just use the phone, McCormick? Call up that guy you met at the spice/flavoring conference?
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| Credit: C&EN |
Breslow said that the chemistry enterprise faces a “morale” problem. “We used to tell students that, if you take an advanced degree in chemistry, your career will be secure. That’s not true anymore.” Like LaMattina, Breslow took aim at the consolidation of the pharmaceutical industry. “Mergers may make great financial sense, but they are very destructive,” he said. “And not just to the pharmaceutical industry, but to the chemistry community in general.”
Mergers and acquisitions in the pharmaceutical industry aren’t going away, of course, and LaMattina observed that the biotech industry isn’t immune to the trend. Breslow insisted that the economic strength of the U.S. “is largely based on the strength of our science and technology. Government must continue to recognize that support for science is important.”
Although the discussions and the question-and-answer follow-up were lively and informative, they did not offer much in the way of reassurance for U.S. chemists in the pharmaceutical industry who fear for their futures.I don't know where Ron Breslow has stood in the past, but I think it's very important that senior members of the academic chemical community recognize the economic picture facing current generations of American chemists. I don't know if it's too much to ask senior members of the pharmaceutical industry to be able to make similar statements about our employment futures; Dr. LaMattina doesn't seem to have directly addressed the issue at the forum.
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| Yet another chance to critique my structures... |
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| Photo credit: Flickr user akahodag (Creative Commons) |
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| Infographic by Socialcast.com |
Biotechnology ranked the No. 1 happiest job in America, according toWhile I might agree with CareerBliss' assessment of what makes for happy employees (i.e. enjoying what you do daily, independence, relative intelligence of coworkers), I find it interesting that they fail to recognize the potential for job insecurity that comes with working in biotechnology. I also find it interesting that "customer service representative" is one of the happiest careers in the US. If so, I think we're in trouble...
CareerBliss. “In biotech, the people that they work with, and more specifically the person that they work for, tends to rank higher in terms of importance, and employees are overwhelmingly happy with those conditions,” says Golledge. Biotechnology employees were also among the most happy with their daily tasks and the level of control they feel they have over that work. She adds that the field of biotechnology is currently a growth industry, which makes growth opportunities in the field another key ingredient to its workers overall happiness.
Ruth did her research and found out that to go into consulting, it is best to have a five-year financial safety cushion, since it can take that long tio break even. After reviewing their family finances and engaging in much discussion with her husband, Ruth decided to try consulting again. She wrote her resignation letter, giving her employer three week's notice and allowing herself time to set up an office, print business cards and so on.
Ruth recalls, "I planned to turn int the resignation when the lab director returned from the trip. However, my plans changed radically when he called the day before I planned to turn in my notice and terminated me. I took me one half hour to pack up and leave.
I also quickly learned that flexibility is a key ingredient for a consultant. The very next morning, my first day on my own, I received a phone call. A company was getting ready for an EPA audit that would occur on the following day.
They had called the lab where I used to work and had been informed that I was out for the day, so they were calling me at home. They asked if I would be willing to assist them and could I be there within an hour. They answer to both was yes, of course. After the initial meeting with the corporate personnel, I was hired. When they asked for a business card I told them I would give them some as soon as I received them from the printers. When asked for a company name, I gave the first name that came to mind, [her last name] Consulting. The audit when well and resulted in a continuing arrangement with that company.I've actually worked with regulatory consultants before -- I find that it appears to attract people in the field (either from the corporate or the government side) with a great deal of experience that have decided to hang out their shingle. They're usually (it appears) used to dealing with impending crises. I think it's interesting how much of these positions is based on setting policy and generating/fighting paperwork and regulatory agencies.
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| From ACS Careers |
As he’s done in the past, the Dow CEO called for a national manufacturing strategy.
Liveris: I do think your notion of a modern day industrial policy, a national, advanced manufacturing policy to spur investments, not subsidies, not incentives, just to make it easier and more understandable would be a great start.
Singapore is the classic example of that, Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore. They are already working on the next industries, in their case, biotech. Germany gets it. Germany, a high wage cost country, understands that I have got figure out what’s going to follow, when the Chinese finally copy my advanced engineering equipment, which they will do.
The “not subsidies, not incentives” part I found interesting. In his book, he had much to say about incentives and how the U.S. should offer incentives similar to the lush subsidies for industry offered in Asian countries. “The problem is that if we refuse to offer these kinds of incentive packages while other countries are aggressively outdoing one another, we put America at a clear competitive disadvantage,” he wrote.
He now seems to be downplaying this view. I do wonder if this interview was conducted after the Solyndra story broke.I agree with Tullo. His comments in the New York Times last week belie his comment ("Overseas,” Mr. Liveris said, “I get tax incentives, and I get incentives to go to certain locations where they offer us utilities, infrastructure and land. I get access to human capital. I get all sorts of support to help train that human capital.”). Perhaps the reporter left out the part where Liveris says, "Yeah, and we don't want that stuff in the ol' USA!"
In this article the authors describe a purification technique for essentially pure chemical solids called informally in Merck Sharpe & Dohme laboratories “swishing”. Swish purification of several grams or several hundred grams of material is accomplished by overnight equilibration in a suitable solvent (an anti-solvent or very poor solvent actually), with magnetic stirring on a small-scale or with mechanical agitation in a Morton (creased) flask for large quantities. The technique is not readily applicable to small samples. Swishing is actually exhaustive equilibrium trituration.
Separating the trituration liquid from the residual solid results in a highly purified solid phase on the one hand and a solution in which many minor impurities are dramatically concentrated on the other. When thin-layer chromatography (TLC) is used to see the pattern and intensities of the impurities, the combined method is called Swish TLC.Kilomentor goes on to describe further uses of swish TLC, including the extraction and identification of low-concentration impurities. An intriguing technique -- I wish I'd thought of it! (And of course, like all intriguing techniques that you've never heard of, it was published long, long, long before I ever started thinking about chemistry.)
Our client has an immediate need for an entry level Quality Control Chemist. This position will involve performing quality control tests on finished products. Instrumentation used will include, pH, titration, flash point, viscosity and FTIR. This is an entry level position. The only requirement is that you have a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry. Please do not apply if you Bachelor's is in anything other then Chemistry.Is that a problem, people applying for technical positions without the degree? These days, maybe.
“What if I go to the jungle or whatever? And say they got actual chemists, like cartel chemists, asking me chemistry stuff that I don’t know how to answer because I’m not you?” Jesse asks, breathless, for a moment the same kid who declared “Yay Mr. White! Yay science!” all those episodes ago, all those months before the fall. “And what if all the equipment is in Mexican instead of English? You know, I don’t know, I don’t know. If I mess this up, I am dead. All of us. Mr. White. Look, I need your help. Maybe you could coach me or something. Or you can give me some notes. Mr. White?”Make sure you have that technology transfer documentation at hand...
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| I'll take that 2 billion dollars if you're not using it. Photo credit: ugo.com |
My idea: outsourced mortgage servicing. Create a mortgage servicer from scratch, where everybody who calls in is given a single point of contact — a unique individual who owns their problems and is charged with finding solutions to any problem, including refinancing and loan modification. There’s got to be a way of building up enough trust with both banks and homeowners, over the course of a year, to build a $2 billion business somehow.Personally, I'd use that 2 billion dollars a couple of ways:
The successful candidate will prepare cost estimates for special synthetic projects (targeting amino acids, organic building blocks and persistent pollutants in the environment) based primarily on data from in-house databases; prepare documents in support of registration under ISO-13485, ISO-17025, CE Mark and GMP and assist in maintaining these programs within the Research Products Department; and prepare cost estimates and support data for the environmental analytical standards product line.Huh -- that's a little odd. It's mostly a cost estimate position.
Following a postdoc, I accepted a job in technical sales for the (now-defunct) Paar Physica USA [1]. I sold rheometers and viscometers. Low-end systems ran were $20,000, mid-range systems were around $50,000, and high-end systems could be purchased for $100,000. (All prices are in 2000 dollars.) The job description in the original post matches some of what I did during the day, but there is a little more involved in technical sales other than just calling someone and updating a database. Here are a few things that anyone should consider when thinking about a technical sales position.
Travel: While one may be able to work out of home a few days a week, constant travel is a fact of life in sales. In order to be considered for that project, it's better to get in front of customers. Substantial travel (up to 90% of your time) may be necessary, especially if you're building your territory. On the days without travel, it is possible to work out of the house. While I didn't mind the travel all that much, the isolation eventually got to me, and I transferred to applications support [2].
Salary: The salesperson is judged on concrete results, specifically, how much you sell. If you sell, you'll keep your job, and if you don't, you won't. Companies are willing to give untested candidates a shot at sales because compensation is a mixture of straight salary and commission. Find out how long the typical project takes and when you'll be expected to start bringing in regular sales.
Nature Vs. Nurture: The guy who hired me often told me that salespeople could be made. If you believe otherwise, then sales is not for you. Before accepting a sales job, inquire about training, whether internal or external.
[1] Paar Physica has been replaced by Anton Paar.
[2] Even though I'm an introvert, I needed to see a variety of people in an office every day. This amuses me to no end.People who are interested in talking more are encouraged to go over to The Rheol World to talk to Eric.
[After her Ph.D.], Lee really wanted to combine her interests in science, public policy, and writing and to do more research and public-policy work. A friend from graduate school heard about a law firm that was looking for a chemist to serve as an advisor and recommended Lee. She jumped at the opportunity, went for the interview and was hired.
Lee's responsibilities have increased in the five years she's been at the law firm. She is now engaged in a much wider variety of activities. In addition to writing policy and technical papers and advising on scientific matters, she spends a significant amount of time in a a management role, helping lead and coordinate activities in which the firm's clients are involved. She explains, "This may involved coordinating the activities of testing labs or managing scientific or industry working groups."How did the lobbyist get their position? (This is a good one).
Jim's first job after graduate school was an assistant professor of chemistry at Davidson College, where he taugh and conducted research for 12 years. While at Davidson, he successfully ran for a position on the Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners. He was a commissioner for six years, serving as chairman for the latter parts of this tenure there... Looking for a ways to make more of an impact, Jim ran for a seat in the UI.S. House of Representatives in 1972. He was elected and ended up serving six consecutive terms... In 1984, he was elected governor of the state of North Carolina... In 1993, he stepped down as governor and prepared to return to private life... He was offered a position heading the research lab at Carolinas Medical Center.. In 1999, instead of retiring, Jim again left the research world to move into public policy, this time as a lobbyist.I should definitely do a post on chemists that end up in government -- there seem to be a fair number of them...
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| Photo credit: 2spi.com |
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| Sign in red box at right. SafeStart image credit: SafeStart |
“An advanced manufacturing policy is what this country must have,” says Andrew N. Liveris, the chairman and chief executive of Dow Chemical, arguing, in effect, that manufacturing needs government support to expand its dwindling share of the nation’s economy. That is particularly so when demand for new products like solar shingles and batteries is not yet enough to justify the investment. (Three solar companies recently filed for bankruptcy.) Mr. Liveris, 57, himself a chemical engineer and co-chairman of President Obama’s newly formed Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, a group of outside advisers, would even “pick winners” — that is, select some manufacturers for continuing support. “I would not let free markets rule without also addressing what I want manufacturing to be 20 or 30 years from now,” he says.
As multinationals place factories abroad, they are putting research centers near them, with as-yet-undetermined consequences. At the very least, this trend challenges the view that the United States has the best scientists and research centers and is thus the research-and-development pacesetter.
From China, Dow Chemical now exports products invented at its research center near Shanghai. “Overseas,” Mr. Liveris said, “I get tax incentives, and I get incentives to go to certain locations where they offer us utilities, infrastructure and land. I get access to human capital. I get all sorts of support to help train that human capital.”
Against that backdrop, he and a few other top executives of multinationals exhort the Obama administration and Congress to grant incentives and subsidies intended to halt the 60-year decline in manufacturing’s contribution to national income. Mr. Liveris recently published a book on the subject. He says vigorous government support, like the subsidies that Dow receives for its solar roof shingle operation and the electric battery factory, might eventually halt manufacturing’s slide. But he adds that his company and others will not embark on a reverse migration, a significant “in-shoring” of what has already moved abroad. Too many consumers are concentrated today in Asia and Europe.
“We put things overseas,” Mr. Liveris says, “because markets were growing there and we wanted to be close to them, and that will never change.”What do I read from this? Well, today, I'm a cynic. I hear 3 things:
Second, some skills are much more sought after than others. For instance, “chemistry graduates are now getting some of the best starting salaries among all graduates,” says Andrew Liveris, the boss of Dow Chemical....I happened upon this little present from Google.*
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| Nice color, innit? (Credit: eatliveplay mid-Michigan) |
I could arc, gas, and spot weld by the time I was 12. A farmer with a welder is an awsome thing to behold.Everyone knows that in graduate school, stuff breaks and there's no money to call in a repair technician. Who's the guy who's going to take apart the instrument, figure out what's wrong, fix it and put it back together? Oh yeah, it's the kid who's been working on their Dad's tractor since he was 13.
Project opportunity for an experienced (formulator) chemist to develop a cleaning product.Area of experience in surfactant solution chemistry is helpful. Qualified individualcan work from home. Please send your questions and CV to: Attn: Allen Jans research_gate@yahoo.comActually, it sounds like interesting work for an experienced formulator.
"Maintaining U.S. leadership in science and technology and addressing the serious healthcare issues facing this country require policies in place that encourage innovation," said Dr. Bahcall. "Reducing the barriers and increasing incentives to innovation can help companies like Synta and other biotechnology companies create new drugs, lower the total costs of healthcare by preventing expensive hospital stays and create new jobs in America."
This article will not be a general review of quality/capability of Chinese CROs/CMOs, but will describe how Synta came to recognize China as a feasible pre/nonclinical outsourcing option through evaluating our partnership with several CROs and CMOs located in China.
I came away from the Council discussion with three main thoughts: First, no one stood up either to defend academic laboratory safety culture or to say ACS shouldn’t get involved (rather, one councilor noted that “There is no college laboratory that I want to work in because they’re so unsafe”), and the flow of suggestions had to be cut off when time ran out. Clearly, the prevailing opinion is that there’s a role here for ACS. [snip]
Third, I also thought that there was too much emphasis on training students and not enough on the role of faculty and administration (a comment left on a post last week said the same thing). Trying to marshal student chapters isn’t going to get very far if the students’ teachers/advisers/mentors aren’t on board. (Re-)training faculty is, of course, a much harder problem than creating safety videos, but if the goal is to change culture, that will happen faster if you include the people with the power. [Emphasis CJ's.]As I'm never tired of saying (and I believe it quotes Harry Elston), safety is a top-down function. Changing the hearts and minds of the faculty to (re)emphasize safety culture is the best way of preventing more tragedies.
Additions in the laboratory can be very fast indeed. One can pour 100 ml of solution into a 250 ml r.b. flask in a few seconds. On scale it is not possible to copy this. The absolute volume of solution is much more; it must be pumped in or run in by gravity through a constricted line; besides, the enthalpy change would most likely be unmanageable. For these reasons, the rate of addition becomes a variable of significant concern in scale up because when we go to large reactors the addition rate is severely constrained compared to the lab situation.
Besides the instantaneous addition of a solution, which I have just posed as an example which is simply impossible other possibilities are seriously discouraged on scale. In the laboratory so long as a strong stream of inert gas is maintained over the reactor surface and the reaction vessel is in a fume hood, a glass stopper can be removed briefly and a solid reactant poured in through a powder. The equivalent would not be acceptable in the chemical plant. The operators would be exposed to chemical contamination, as would the atmosphere in the plant and the inertness of the reactor atmosphere would be seriously compromised. Also, the addition would not be adequately reproducible and if there were solvent already in the reactor when the solid addition was made there could be a dangerous splash back.
A number of reactions require the slow and controlled addition of a solution containing one reagent to another. These are ideal for scale up. Slow addition is both necessary and simple to achieve on-scale; rather, the technical difficulty that the process development chemist needs to solve is how to duplicate in the laboratory these slow additions on scale to model the process.I think this is one of the biggest worries that I have as a process chemist -- the simple addition that I'm performing on laboratory scale, how will it scale? Will an undesired side reaction happen during the slow addition? What is the best way to simulate what will be run in the plant? (Answers next week.)
As I read about the research fraud case at Columbia University (C&EN, July 11, page 4), my mind instantly went back to a similar case at Purdue University uncovered in 1964. I attended my graduation in May of that year and was awarded a Ph.D. in chemistry. A statement of retraction of a Ph.D. was printed in the graduation program. A student studying under the guidance of Robert A. Benkeser was charged with faking his research results, and his Ph.D. degree had been withdrawn.
The student was a very intelligent person, perhaps brilliant. He never seemed to study much and yet easily passed all of his course exams and degree qualifying examinations. His thesis was about the synthesis of silicocyclopentadiene or derivatives thereof. As in the case of Bengü Sezen, his chicanery was discovered when well-known researchers in the field reported to Benkeser that they could not repeat his student’s literature-reported experimental procedures.
Investigation of the student’s work revealed falsely constructed nuclear magnetic resonance and infrared spectra. Another of Benkeser’s students working in the same laboratory almost had his doctoral work discredited. Fortunately, timely and detailed detective work proved that the second student knew nothing of the fraud, and he was awarded his advanced degree. The student who faked the work allegedly graduated from Harvard University, but I believe the work there also proved fraudulent. Efforts to find the student who perpetrated the fraud were not successful. He was to have started postgraduate work with a famous researcher in Chicago but instead just disappeared.
Stephen E. FrenchI'm under the impression that it was probably a lot easier to fake data back then, but that's just a gut feeling. There were a lot fewer journals back then, and people seemed to pay a lot more attention to them. Sigh.
Rochester, N.Y.
Every day, we read about the dismal employment outlook. Right now, the national unemployment rate is hovering above 9% in the U.S. Chemical workers have generally fared better, with unemployment at 3.8%. As ACS Director-at-Large Valerie J. Kuck explained in last week’s Comment, however, aggregate national employment statistics don’t provide the whole picture (C&EN, Aug. 29, page 41). Kuck focused on key regional differences, noting that employment opportunities for chemists were particularly tight in the Middle Atlantic and Pacific Regions.
As the chair of the ACS Committee on Minority Affairs, I’d like to draw your attention to employment disparities among minorities. As measured by the 2010 ACS ChemCensus survey, nationwide unemployment among chemical workers is 6.3% for African Americans, 4.6% for Hispanics, and 4.3% for Asians. On the other hand, the national unemployment rate for whites in chemistry is 3.7%.
Not only are minorities having a more difficult time finding employment, but these employment disparities may also send a signal to young minorities that a career in chemistry may not be the best choice for them. We can speculate about the underlying reasons for the disparities in employment among ethnic and racial groups in chemistry; however, there is no doubt that we need to take action to correct these disparities.Once again, I'm surprised that like Valerie Kuck last week, Dr. Aldridge chooses to see the ACS member unemployment rate in a relative sense (compared to the national unemployment rate), rather than an absolute one (the 2nd highest in 20 years). Nevertheless, here's hoping something good comes out of ACS' efforts towards Paying It Forward.
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