Yellow Post-it notes

A list of small, useful things (links):

• Egon Willighagen on the 2017 spring ACS medchem structure disclosures. 
• A new post from All Things Metathesis.
• The Suvi Orr saga grinds on and on and on...
• The latest from Nature Chemistry: Jen Heemstra, Hosea Nelson, and Xin Su.
• Ash has a list of science books for young teens.
• From the inbox, this interesting blog titled "Drug Approvals International." 
• The latest from "Stellen für Chemiker." 

Again, an open invitation to all interested in writing a blog, a hobby that will bring you millions thousands hundreds tens of dollars joy and happiness. Send me a link to your post, and I'd be happy to put it up.

Ask CJ: What should a new employee do about layoffs?

From the inbox, a question about what new graduates should do about layoffs, especially when they fall within a year or two of your hire date?

First, there's not much you can do about it - you can prepare your resume, you can work on your resume and your research summary. You can try to find people to act as your references, and start networking and brushing up your LinkedIn profile.

Other than that, I can't think of anything that you can do. The ax is gonna fall (or not), and there's not a lot that you can do to control that. Readers, any advice? I'd like to hear from people who have been through layoffs, especially those for whom the layoffs came early in their time at the relevant company. 

An interesting prediction from Bruce Booth

I thought this prediction was interesting in this Bruce Booth post on CADD and how we're not quite there yet:

...Laboratory science may have gone increasingly virtual – as in distributed remotely – but it’s not yet fully automated for robots and AI just yet. Maybe work at firms like Transcriptic and Emerald Cloud Labs will change that over time, but it’s not likely broadly applicable in the near term. 

I’m guessing my kids (13, 12, and 9 years old) will still be able to find a career with a lab coat if they wanted, but maybe my grandkids won’t. You can be sure the future scientists of my kids’ age will need to appreciate how to apply the best CADD approaches if they are to be discovering the drugs of the future.

I'll make a similar prediction: when the children of today can have a job in the lab (i.e. ~10-15 years from now), the median chemist will be making not much more than they are today, i.e. the median chemist's income will not have climbed significantly against inflation.

Here's hoping I'm wrong, but I don't think so. 

The Medicinal Chemist Jobs List: 94 positions

The Medicinal Chemist Jobs list has 94 positions.

Want to help out? Here's a Google Form to enter positions, but if you want to do the traditional "leave a link in the comments", that works, too.

Want to chat about medchem positions? Try the open thread.

Positions I'm not including: positions outside the United States (this will likely change), computational positions (this will likely change as well), process positions (coming soon....), academic positions (likely never.)

Coming soon: a process chemistry version - I promise! (soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooon)

Interesting table of H1b use for chemists

Credit: C&EN

Also in this week's C&EN, an interesting idea by Andrea Widener to use myvisajobs to look for H1b visa holders for "chemist" positions. I think there is a little bit of a problem here, in that some positions don't use the title "chemist", i.e. Pfizer calls entry-level Ph.D. positions "senior scientists."

I suspect that an enterprising person could put together a pretty strong database of all the positions in the country that use H1b visa holders for chemists this way.

UPDATE: Also, I thought it was interesting that Amneal, Novel, and Ascent seem to be generics firms. (That Ascent salary! (fans self))

Daily Pump Trap: 4/27/17 edition

A few of the recent posts at C&EN Jobs:

St. Louis, MO: This Monsanto program for new Ph.D. chemists looks interesting (reminds me of the Esprit program for GSK.)

Branford, CT: Never heard of FreeThink Technologies before, but they are looking for a Ph.D. chemist.

Birmingham, AL: BioCryst is looking for a B.S. chemist with extensive experience for a position as "Manager of Analytical Development and Quality Control."

Rise of the Machines?: Interesting to see that LLNL is hiring a postdoc to work on "machine learning modeling of corrosion on actinide metal and metal-oxide surfaces."

Las Vegas, NV: I feel like we've seen this ad for a laboratory director for a cannabis lab before...

Parsippany, NJ: TetraTech is searching for an environmental chemist oriented towards DoD hazardous waste - bet that's an interesting one.

Hattiesburg, MS: Superior Polymers, searching for a B.S./M.S. process engineer.

Washington, DC: A little magazine is searching for a biotech reporter.

Ivory Filter Flask: 4/27/17 edition

A few of the recent academic postings at C&EN Jobs:

Alma, MI: Alma College, looking for a visiting assistant professor of general/organic chemistry.

Ames, IA: Iowa State, searching for a general/organic lecturer.

Birmingham, AL: University of Alabama-Birmingham, hiring an organic teaching postdoc.

Boston, MA:  Boston University, searching for a lecturer with a background in organic/bio-organic chemistry.

Bowling Green, OH: ...and BGSU, looking for a lecturer.

Manchester, NH:  ...and Saint Anselm, hiring "1-year faculty position OR adjunct(s)." 

The cruel rituals of layoffs

In Science magazine, a sad essay about the perfunctory ways that layoffs are announced by Regina L. Ruben: 

...My introduction to this new type of tissue culture came after 19 years in a job I loved at a small pharmaceutical company (although in this first case no one actually offered me any tissues). Having been at the company for such a long time, I felt I had some job security. But I found out how wrong I was when the company was sold. Part of me understood that losing my job this way was “just business,” but I still felt a deep professional and personal loss. Nevertheless, I determinedly set out to find a new job, where I hoped I would have an equally long and satisfying tenure.  

I landed a job that I was excited about, a director position at a large pharmaceutical company. I genuinely enjoyed it and was looking forward to my future at the company. But, late one afternoon, about 2 years after I had started, the medical director and human resources (HR) representative escorted me to the HR office. The walk, in silence, felt funereal. When we arrived, the HR rep pushed a box of tissues across the desk in my direction. I knew this was going to be bad. She explained that my position was being eliminated in a reorganization....

There is a funny aspect to grief, emotion and the American workplace. The HR people don't really want you to use the tissues - they don't want you to start crying there, nor do they want you to scream aloud. Rather, the tissues (just like the whole [redacted] ritual) are saying "We are pretending to care about your feelings, even as we are cutting you off from your living and our community of fellow workers."

(NB I don't know what the right way to do layoffs is - I've heard lots of different stories and they have all seemed rather humiliating, some more than others.) 

Warning Letter of the Week: integration inhibition edition

A friendly missive from the Center for Drug Research and Evaluation to the Director and President of Operations of Divi’s Laboratories Ltd. (Unit II): 

1.      Failure to ensure that test procedures are scientifically sound and appropriate to ensure that your API conform to established standards of quality and/or purity.
Our investigators observed that the software you use to conduct high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) analyses of API for unknown impurities is configured to permit extensive use of the “inhibit integration” function without scientific justification.  For example, our investigator reviewed the integration parameters you used for HPLC identification of impurities in release testing for [redacted]. These parameters demonstrated that your software was set to inhibit peak integration at four different time periods throughout the analysis. Similarly, in the impurities release testing you performed for [redacted], your HPLC parameters were set to inhibit integration at four different time periods throughout the analysis.

Inhibiting integration at various points during release testing for commercial batches is not scientifically justified. It can mask identification and quantitation of impurities in your API, which may result in releasing API that do not conform to specifications.

I didn't know you could do that - the things you learn.... 

2017 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List: 590 positions

The 2017 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List (curated mostly by Andrew Spaeth, with minor help from me) has 590 positions.

Seeing as how we have seemed to hit an overall plateau, I will be ending the regular updates for the 2017 list, with the final one being published on the morning of May 2, 2017.

I plan the new list to begin on or around July 1, 2017, with all future discussions happening on the Chemistry Faculty Jobs List webforum.

The usual stuff: 

Have you had a Skype/phone interview or an on-site with a position on the Faculty Jobs List? Please add the date of the interview to the open thread. The open thread is here.

Do you see anything that needs correcting? Please leave a comment in the open thread, or e-mail me at chemjobber@gmail.com

As the 2017 Faculty Jobs Open Thread has gotten longer, the Blogger software that this blog is run on has added a new wrinkle: when you initially load the thread, it loads only the first ~220 comments and then has a "load more" button near the bottom of the page near the comment box. Only after pressing that button about 7 times does it load the latest comments.

A link to See Arr Oh's Chemistry Bumper Cars 2017 edition.

Faculty position: chemical engineering, Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, ON

From the inbox, a somewhat unusual position: 

The Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the Royal Military College (RMC) of Canada is currently seeking candidates for two Faculty Engineering positions.
...Suitable candidates should have a minimum ability to function in both French and English and should submit the required documentation by close of business on May 12th. 

I regret that I did not know much about the Royal Military College of Canada, but now I know a little more!

Full position here. Best wishes to those interested.  

What happened to all the sparteine?, 2017 edition

Also in this week's C&EN, a really fun and informative article by Stephen K. Ritter on the aftermath of the Great Sparteine Shortage of 2010. It sounds like TCI America has taken this problem on: 

A few clues in the case of the missing (–)-sparteine did turn up during C&EN’s investigation. The compound has been found in two places: U.S.-based chemical suppliers Sigma-Aldrich and TCI America report having small quantities available. Sigma-Aldrich sales representatives say they have no idea what is happening with the (–)-sparteine supply chain and can’t disclose its source. The company lists (–)-sparteine from $50 per 0.5 g and up, depending on the grade and amount. 

At TCI, R&D Manager Sriramurthy Vardhineedi has a bit more to share. In 2011, when TCI recognized the shortage, the company developed a proprietary procedure to produce kilogram quantities of high-purity (–)-sparteine as needed, Vardhineedi says. TCI is possibly the world’s only current commercial producer, he notes. (–)-Sparteine remains in high demand, Vardhineedi adds, but he points out it is expensive. TCI offers the compound at $98 per gram and up, depending on the amount. 

As to what happened to the supply after 2010? “We are guessing that some company decided to stop making this valuable chiral alkaloid without realizing they were the sole supplier,” Vardhineedi says.

I would really like to know what caused the shortage - and here's hoping that we don't have to wait another 7 years to find the answer! 

This week's C&EN

A few of the articles from this week's issue of Chemical and Engineering News:

• Cover: chemists in Cuba (article by Andrea Widener)
• New science around naked mole rats in hypoxic situations (article by Sarah Everts)
• New ways to make trifluoromethylated cyclopropane units on arenes. (article by Stu Borman)
• CSB concludes that a pump overheated at an Airgas facility that suffered a nitrous oxide explosion, and that the facility didn't have an effective safety management system. (article by Jessica Morrison) 
• Scientists running for public office (article by Jyllian Kemsley)
• New hydrogen-generating technologies from quantum dots (article by Stephen K. Ritter)

View From Your Hood: Lac Leman edition

From chemTwitter denizen Suzanne Jansze:

"I have been working at the EPFL in Switzerland for the past two years and have a nice view on the Alps and Lac Leman (better known as lake Geneva)."

(got a View from Your Hood submission? Send it in (with a caption and a credit, please) at chemjobber@gmail.com; will run every other Friday.) 

This "Drug Discovery Game" looks fun

From the inbox, an interesting idea: 

The Drug Discovery Game is an engaging, fun, interactive demonstration that serves as a springboard to a discussion of the methods used in medicinal chemistry.  Students (playing the role of medicinal chemists) are given seed capital money and challenged to invent a small molecule pharmaceutical starting with a central molecular scaffold and molecular fragments.  The demonstrator/teacher (playing the role of a biologist running an assay) provides logical feedback after each student’s attempt that guides the student toward the solution.  The game simulates portions of the workflow of medicinal chemistry research and launches discussions of such topics as the methods of modern drug invention, the cost of pharmaceuticals, molecular structure and design, and structure-activity relationships. 

This website contains all that is required to play the game including a “how-to-play” video, instructions for set-up, rules, freely downloadable pieces for various puzzles, and some ideas for education discussion points.  The game has been employed as an educational outreach activity for upper elementary, middle, and high school students during “Take Your Child to Work Day” at a biotechnology company and utilized during introductory lessons in organic and medicinal chemistry on an undergraduate level...

Sounds like a great idea and a wonderful way to talk about drug discovery in an interactive way with kids (probably older ones?)

(On a side note, Take Your Child to Work Day is next Wednesday, April 27. My company doesn't do this sort of thing - what are folks' experiences with this on at your organizations? What works well, what doesn't?) 

Derek Lowe on the geography of medicinal chemistry jobs

Via his Reddit AMA, a relevant question answered by Derek Lowe:

u/organiker: Any tips on landing a med chem job these days for someone with a PhD + postdoc experience? 

Also, what's the typical career progression for someone ending up in a chief science officer/division head/head of chemistry type role? 

Derek Lowe: It's not easy out there, but it can be done. Your odds are probably better with smaller companies, and there are two ways to play that. One is to head to where the smaller companies (and many of the bigger ones) are, that is, Boston/Cambridge or the SF Bay area. That's not a bad idea, but another strategy might be to try outfits that aren't in such a rich labor environment and would be happier to get you. The downside of that is, when the small company wipes out, as many do, you're left without as many options. That factor alone is a big reason for the popularity of the big clusters. 

I don't know if there's a typical progression, as to the second question. A lot of larger companies have two tracks (managerial and scientific), so if you want one of those jobs, you'll want to be on the first one. I never inclined that way, so I may not be a good person to ask!

It will be really interesting to see when (if ever) Peak SSF or Peak Kendall Square will come, if ever. I suspect it will take some sort of bizarre event to change this trend, but maybe I'm wrong. 

The Medicinal Chemist Jobs List: 94 positions

The Medicinal Chemist Jobs list has 94 positions.

Want to help out? Here's a Google Form to enter positions, but if you want to do the traditional "leave a link in the comments", that works, too.

Want to chat about medchem positions? Try the open thread.

Positions I'm not including: positions outside the United States (this will likely change), computational positions (this will likely change as well), process positions (coming soon....), academic positions (likely never.)

Coming soon: a process chemistry version - I promise! (sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooon)

Daily Pump Trap: 4/20/17 edition

A few of the positions posted recently at C&EN Jobs:

Richmond, VA: Evonik, looking for a Ph.D. pesticide chemist.

Dhahran, Saudi Arabia:  Saudi Aramco, hiring a process safety engineer.

Looking for editors: Nature Electronics, looking for an associate or senior editor. Also, Nature Catalysis. (That 62k salary isn't right, right?)

A broader look:  A broader look: Monster, Careerbuilder, Indeed and USAjobs.gov show (respectively) "1000+", 426, 9,644 and 15 positions for the search term "chemist."

LinkedIn shows 3,429 positions for the search term "chemist" and 20,518 for the search term "chemistry." Job titles from LinkedIn - first with quotes, and the second without: Polymer Chemist: 11/714. Analytical chemist: 234/302. Research chemist: 46/58. Synthetic chemist: 18/690. Medicinal chemist: 19/50. Organic chemist: 37/77. Process chemist: 32/72. Process development chemist: 10/12. Formulation chemist: 54/64.

A very helpful graphic for polymer chemists

by @DKSchne

Original graphic here (by @DKSchne.) 

"I Work from Home"

I found this hilarious, but I think I go for The New Yorker's bizarre sense of humor. For those in the office, you'll want some headphones (NSFW-ish.)

Pretty sure that's not non-toxic?

Wired magazine had a fun article about rat contraception in New York City (of course.) It had this interesting little paragraph (emphasis mine): 

Credit: Sigma-Aldrich

...ContraPest works by attacking oocytes, the egg precursors that every female mammal is born with. The active ingredient in the product is something called 4-vinylcyclohexene diepoxide, or VCD. It’s tongue-numbingly spicy, but totally non-toxic—except to oocytes. Specifically, it binds to a receptor that, when activated by a survival factor, keeps the egg precursor alive and healthy during a female’s baby-making years. But when VCD binds, it interferes with that signal and the oocyte dies. “The chemical destroys the eggs in their very smallest form so the animals can’t ovulate anymore,” says endocrinologist Pat Hoyer, who spent two decades figuring out the mechanism in mice and rats. No eggs, no offspring.

I'm not crazy in thinking something with two epoxides should have a hard time being called "totally non-toxic", am I? The Sigma-Aldrich MSDS seems to indicate that you should avoid using VCD as hand lotion...

2017 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List: 588 positions

The 2017 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List (curated mostly by Andrew Spaeth, with minor help from me) has 588 positions.

Seeing as how we have seemed to hit an overall plateau, I will be ending the regular updates for the 2017 list, with the final one being published on the morning of May 2, 2017.

I plan the new list to begin on or around July 1, 2017, with all future discussions happening on the Chemistry Faculty Jobs List webforum.

The usual stuff: 

Have you had a Skype/phone interview or an on-site with a position on the Faculty Jobs List? Please add the date of the interview to the open thread. The open thread is here.

Do you see anything that needs correcting? Please leave a comment in the open thread, or e-mail me at chemjobber@gmail.com

As the 2017 Faculty Jobs Open Thread has gotten longer, the Blogger software that this blog is run on has added a new wrinkle: when you initially load the thread, it loads only the first ~220 comments and then has a "load more" button near the bottom of the page near the comment box. Only after pressing that button about 7 times does it load the latest comments.

A link to See Arr Oh's Chemistry Bumper Cars 2017 edition.

Daily Pump Trap: 4/18/17 edition

A (very) few of the positions posted at C&EN Jobs:

Pretty slim pickings...: Not much there...

Fremont, CA: Matheson Tri-Gas is looking for a senior product manager for electronics. There's also an entry-level product manager.

Ivory Filter Flask: 4/18/17 edition

A few of the academic positions recently posted at C&EN Jobs:

Marquette, MI: Northern Michigan University is looking for a organic/general chemistry instructor. 

Biggest little postdoc in the world: The University of Nevada - Reno is searching for a teaching postdoc. 

Newark, DE: The University of Delaware is searching for a senior laboratory technician; duties include "preparing solutions, analyses and experiments for General, Biochemical, and Organic laboratory courses."

Manhattan, KS: Kansas State is looking for an "Assistant Professor in Grain Processing." Huh. 

How many chemical biologists are there?

Via random clickings on Twitter (or was it LinkedIn?), this interesting statement in a Nature Reviews Drug Discovery interview with Jay Bradner (the president of NIBR) about making a strong push into chemical biology: 

...Building on this legacy, we have created a new discovery unit with NIBR: Chemical Biology & Therapeutics (CBT). To my knowledge, chemical biology has not previously been an organizing principle for serious efforts in coordinated drug discovery. 

What does this mean in practical terms? 

We have pulled the foundational disciplines of chemical biology into one seamless collaborative unit. CBT — under the direction of Jeff Porter — will innovate new small-molecule libraries with unique functionalities, implement high-throughput biology in annotated libraries, reconsider protein sciences and integrate sophisticated computational analyses, all to glean unexpected insights from biological systems. Examples include new types of therapeutic agent, such as targeted-protein degraders that link the cellular machinery of degradation to proteins of therapeutic interest, and reconsiderations of chemical equity, such as vast and chiral DNA-encoded libraries. We intend to organize around new types of chemical tool to make unprecedented insights into disease biology, and we expect that new therapeutic vectors will emanate immediately from these efforts. 

I envision more than 400 chemical biologists organizing around these principles. (emphasis CJ's) And we've spent a lot of time reworking the organization to colocalize these individuals, because I believe that a high degree of effective molarity drives innovation in biomedical research.

So how many chemical biologists are there? I sent this question out on Twitter, with the rhetorical question of "Are there 400 chemical biologists?" I regret that what I really meant was  "Are there 400 chemical biologists who are footloose-and-fancy-free enough for Jay Bradner to hire?" I think most folks interpreted my question as "no way there are 400 chemical biologists!", and I only have myself to blame for that. (I don't think that, actually.)

There were a vast number of estimates, all taking the over: Laura Kiessling said definitely more than 400 (so did Matt Disney), Anirban Mahapatra also suggested a number in the 1000s (with a good way to estimate being the various co-authors of the various chemical biology journals out there). Patrick Holder also says "well over a 1000 worldwide" (considering that Cal probably has produced over 120 during its time). Aaron Crapster suggests that there have been over 500 trained in the Bay Area alone (in the past 10 years.)

Finally, Professor Bertozzi weighed in: "If the >150 PhD and postdocs trained in my lab qualify as chemical biologists, then the # worldwide must be more like 10,000."

(This has got to be wrong, don't you think? Are there 66 Carolyn Bertozzi-equivalents in the world in terms of training chemical biologists? Are there 132 0.5CBEs? or 264 0.25CBEs?)

Sadly, I can't rely on my favorite crutch, the Survey of Earned Doctorates, which is relatively silent as to the specific field of chemical biology. I did find a surprising fact: the United States has graduated somewhere between 700 and 800 Ph.D. biochemists every year between 2005 and 2015. By comparison, readers of this blog know that the U.S. graduated somewhere around 600-650 Ph.D. organic chemists a year during this time.

Regarding the specific question that I had, i.e. "how many Ph.D. chemical biologists have graduated in the United States?" I estimated (without much thought) that the number was less than 1000. (I was spitballing 50 per year with "chemical biology" having been around for ~20 years.) I could be convinced it's more than that (2000? 2500?), but not by much. As for the worldwide number, I honestly have no idea.

Readers, what do you think? 

Another one for the MICE files

Also in this week's C&EN, looks like the U.S. attorney has another trade secrets case (article by Marc S. Reisch): 

...Anchi Hou, 61, who worked at DuPont for 27 years, is accused of downloading more than 20,000 files on DuPont’s flexographic printing plate technology in the months prior to his retirement at the end of 2016. If convicted, Hou could receive a sentence of up to 10 years in prison and pay a fine of up to $250,000. 

According to a Federal Bureau of Investigation complaint filed against him in the U.S. District Court in Newark, N.J., Hou worked in DuPont’s advanced printing division in Parlin, N.J., and was involved in the development of photo-polymeric plates used in printing presses. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemical engineering from National Taiwan University and a Ph.D. from Penn State University. 

Four days after forming a flexographic printing consultancy in November 2016, Hou told DuPont he planned to retire at the end of the year. In December, Hou was discovered taking photos of equipment in the Parlin facility. The firm then checked computer records and discovered that Hou had been downloading proprietary documents since July. 

DuPont filed a civil complaint last month suggesting that Hou had visited printing firms in Taiwan in July 2016 with an eye to selling them proprietary information. The FBI arrested Hou on April 7 after learning that he and his family had booked airline flights to leave the U.S.

Of the four reasons that people perform espionage (Money, Ideology, Compromise and Ego), it looks like Dr. Hou was after Money.

(I wonder what was the actual criminal act? Surely it's not illegal to become a consultant and to use the knowledge gained from your employer, but it is probably illegal to take documents containing trade secrets from your employer. Are the pictures illegal?) 

This week's C&EN

A few of the articles in this week's issue of Chemical and Engineering News:

• Cover: Linda Wang, on undocumented immigrants in the chemical sciences
• Interesting new technology from the Baran group to access boronic acids (article by Bethany Halford)
• MOFs to detect solvents (article by Jyllian Kemsley)
• A new company to cure hearing loss? Sounds good to me. (article by Lisa Jarvis)
• I've been working around plant equipment routinely 5+ years now - I wonder how my hearing has been affected? 
• "C&EN’s annual R&D spending survey shows that 19 large U.S. and European chemical firms collectively cut research outlays by 5.2% in 2016 to $9.7 billion." (article by Marc Reisch)
• Well, that's not good. 
• Some d00d writing about cleaning up in the lab.

HPLC vial caps

A list of small, useful things (links):

• Ash on R.B. Woodward
• A removal of an expression of concern for a paper at an RSC journal (via Retraction Watch)
• A retraction of a series of papers in ACS journals for incorrect coding (again, via Retraction Watch)
• Prof. Yudin on tautomerism
• The latest from Stellen für Chemiker
• Dan Erlanson covers some important findings in astrochemistry.
• Peter Kenny has some similarly dated findings.
• Slava Bernat on the click reaction, and fundamental science. 

Again, an open invitation to all interested in writing a blog, a hobby that will bring you millions thousands hundreds tens of dollars joy and happiness. Send me a link to your post, and I'd be happy to put it up.

The Medicinal Chemist Jobs List: 87 positions

The Medicinal Chemist Jobs list has 87 positions.

Want to help out? Here's a Google Form to enter positions, but if you want to do the traditional "leave a link in the comments", that works, too.

Want to chat about medchem positions? Try the open thread.

Positions I'm not including: positions outside the United States (this will likely change), computational positions (this will likely change as well), process positions (coming soon....), academic positions (likely never.)

Coming soon: a process chemistry version - I promise! (soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooon)

Daily Pump Trap: 4/13/17

A few of the recent positions posted at C&EN Jobs:

Want to be a Nature editor: They're looking for one in chemical biology or biomaterials and another in functional organic materials.

North Brunswick, NJ: Chromocell is looking for a M.S. natural products chemist with 3-5 years of experience.

Rockville, MD: NCATS is looking for M.S./Ph.D. medicinal chemists.

A few water chemistry positions: Denver Water has a water quality laboratory manager position (pays $7,125.73 monthly (min) to $10,689.47 monthly (max)). Also, the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (located in Silver Spring, MD) is searching for a senior water quality specialist (paying $67,636 - $103,250.)

Beerse, Antwerp, Belgium: Janssen Research & Development is looking for a Ph.D. chemist (with 1-5 years experience) to be a medicinal chemist. "The Neuroscience (NS) Medicinal Chemistry department in Europe, which includes a satellite research site in Toledo (Spain), is focused on developing innovative small molecule therapeutics to treat Alzheimer’s disease." 

Ivory Filter Flask: 4/13/17 edition

A few of the recent (or past recent) academic positions at C&EN Jobs: 

Lancaster, PA: Franklin & Marshall College is searching for a visiting assistant professor of chemistry. 

Somers, WI: The University of Wisconsin-Parkside is looking for a lecturer; M.S. required, Ph.D. preferred. 

Charlottesville, VA: The University of Virginia is also hiring a lecturer.

Interesting partner...: Hong Kong Baptist University is searching for a research assistant professor; the partner is the State Key Laboratory of Environmental and Biological Analysis. (Someday I will understand the State Key system in China.) 

La Jolla, CA: UC San Diego has an opening for a Lecturer with Potential Security of Employment (I love that title.) 

Highest court in the land, lowest rung on the ladder

A hilarious story in the Washington Post by Robert Barndes about the duties of the least-senior associate justice of the United States Supreme Court: 

The junior justice has three unique responsibilities, she said. But in recounting them, she always starts with the fact that the newest justice is assigned to cafeteria duty and keeps it until the next justice is confirmed. 

“I think this is a way to kind of humble people,” she said during the “fireside chat” at the elegant Broadmoor resort in Colorado Springs. “You think you’re kind of hot stuff. You’re an important person. You’ve just been confirmed to the United States Supreme Court. 

“And now you are going to monthly cafeteria committee meetings where literally the agenda is what happened to the good recipe for the chocolate chip cookies.”
The justices eat lunch together on the days when they hear oral arguments, Kagan explained. 

“Somebody will say, ‘Who’s our representative to the cafeteria committee again?’ Like they don’t know, right? And then they’ll say, ‘This soup is very salty.’ And I’m like supposed to go fix it myself?”

I really found this story hilarious, especially the bit about the junior justice being the only one who opens the door to the justice's conference room. 

2017 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List: 588 positions

The 2017 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List (curated mostly by Andrew Spaeth, with minor help from me) has 588 positions.

Have you had a Skype/phone interview or an on-site with a position on the Faculty Jobs List? Please add the date of the interview to the open thread. The open thread is here.

Do you see anything that needs correcting? Please leave a comment in the open thread, or e-mail me at chemjobber@gmail.com

As the 2017 Faculty Jobs Open Thread has gotten longer, the Blogger software that this blog is run on has added a new wrinkle: when you initially load the thread, it loads only the first ~220 comments and then has a "load more" button near the bottom of the page near the comment box. Only after pressing that button about 7 times does it load the latest comments.

A web forum! Because the open thread has gotten more unwieldy, I have opened up this web forum ("Chemistry Faculty Jobs List"). Feel free to join/post!

Finally, a link to See Arr Oh's Chemistry Bumper Cars 2017 edition.

Even the Woodward group

I don't know why, but I liked this anecdote for Bethany Halford's excellent cover story about R.B. Woodward (on the occasion of his 100th birthday). It's emblematic of something about academia, but I can't quite put my finger on it: 

David M. Lemal, a Dartmouth College chemistry professor, was a graduate student in Woodward’s group from 1955 to 1958. He recalls one particular Thursday-night seminar when another graduate student who seemed to have no good prospect of getting a degree anytime soon presented a large body of work done by German chemist Otto Diels in the early 1900s. It was just a large number of different reactions, as Lemal remembers, and it was clear, with the gains chemistry had made in the intervening decades, that Diels’s interpretation of the chemistry was incorrect. 

After the student’s presentation, Woodward asked everyone in the room to try to figure out what was actually going on. After 90 minutes of silence and furious scribbling, “Woodward got up and went to the blackboard and reinterpreted this body of work from beginning to end with great clarity in his usual blackboard work that you can photograph and put in a textbook,” Lemal says. Woodward sent the graduate student into the lab to repeat the work with modern analytical tools. The student was able to confirm Woodward’s conclusions and in short order wrote his Ph.D. thesis and graduated.

I think that all the tropes of graduate school in chemistry are all there: the group black sheep, the not-so-great group meeting, the extended group meeting and the flash of insight that breaks a grad student free. Not all stories have a happy ending, but this one does. (I wonder what happened to them?)  

Unstructured interviews are probably not worth much

Via the New York Times, Jason Dana, a Yale School of Management professor, writes on interviews: 

...This is a widespread problem. Employers like to use free-form, unstructured interviews in an attempt to “get to know” a job candidate. Such interviews are also increasingly popular with admissions officers at universities looking to move away from test scores and other standardized measures of student quality. But as in my friend’s case, interviewers typically form strong but unwarranted impressions about interviewees, often revealing more about themselves than the candidates. 

People who study personnel psychology have long understood this. In 1979, for example, the Texas Legislature required the University of Texas Medical School at Houston to increase its incoming class size by 50 students late in the season. The additional 50 students that the school admitted had reached the interview phase of the application process but initially, following their interviews, were rejected. A team of researchers later found that these students did just as well as their other classmates in terms of attrition, academic performance, clinical performance (which involves rapport with patients and supervisors) and honors earned. The judgment of the interviewers, in other words, added nothing of relevance to the admissions process. 

Research that my colleagues and I have conducted shows that the problem with interviews is worse than irrelevance: They can be harmful, undercutting the impact of other, more valuable information about interviewees....

Professor Dana suggests that, while interviews are not a very good tool, asking all the candidates the same questions is probably a good way of getting better comparisons. I could believe this, but I'm never quite sure.

(Personally, I have always thought that the "new" (probably 20 years old?) style of "behavior-based interviews" ("tell me about a time you've solved a problem") is will someday engender "Reservoir Dogs"-style fake anecdotes  where you make up a story where you are the hero. That's probably because I am a bad person or something.) 

Your 2018 presidential-elect candidates: Bonnie A. Charpentier and Willie E. May

Also in this week's C&EN, the selection of the 2018 president-elect candidates (article by Linda Wang):

At the ACS Council meeting, councilors selected two candidates for 2018 ACS president-elect: Bonnie A. Charpentier of Cytokinetics, Inc. and Willie E. May, recently retired from the National Institute of Standards & Technology.

Will be interesting to see their answers to the #chemjobs questionnaire this fall. 

This week's C&EN

A few of the articles from this week's issue of Chemical and Engineering News:

• Cover: On the occasion of R.B. Woodward's 100th birthday, by Bethany Halford
• The latest in Huntington's disease therapies, by Erika Gebel Berg
• Also, the FDA approves the first deuterated drug, which is also an anti-Huntington's therapy.
• A record set at ACS San Francisco: 18,917 attendees (article by Linda Wang)
• Alex Tullo's writeup of the IHS Markit petrochemical conference
• Interesting how American infrastructure is problematic for chemical exporters'
• Minerals of the Anthropocene, by Ryan Cross

View from Your Hood: sunset edition

Credit: Luke Gamon

From Luke Gamon: "Here's the view from level 5 at the Panum Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Thanks to heritage laws, Panum stands tall over Copenhagen and offers year-round views of the city. The winter sunsets are incredible."

(got a View from Your Hood submission? Send it in (with a caption, please) at chemjobber@gmail.com; will run every other Friday.) 

Celebrating failure, in a good way

Via friend of the blog James Ashenhurst, a very nice Wall Street Journal story by Jonathan D. Rockoff on how pharmaceutical companies express their appreciation of scientists, even as drug candidates don't quite make it all the way to approval: 

...Ironwood began holding “drug wakes” to ease the minds of employees who were upset when the company’s research for its first drug program failed, R&D chief Mark Currie said. The company wanted to dispel concerns that staff would lose their jobs*, while helping them to move on to the next project. The most recent event, held last year for a drug for diabetic gastroparesis (a stomach condition), was Ironwood’s sixth drug wake. 

The company had been working on the drug for more than a decade. As they entered the party on Aug. 9, employees walked past a cooler of beer bottles and a poster memorializing the failed compound. On a podium inside, cupcakes were frosted with letters spelling out the amino-acid sequence that made up the drug. Speakers recalled the patients who had shared their stories of living with the painful condition, while toasting the molecule’s “intestinal fortitude.” 

“I will carry it with me forever,” said Carolyn Higgins, the project’s manager. The molecule, Ms. Higgins said, enjoyed the kind of life that any peptide could “hope for.”

I really think this could contribute to a good atmosphere at a company; it's nice when higher-ups can acknowledge good work, even when things don't quite work out. (I presume that the parties when drugs actually are approved are a lot bigger.)

*It seems worth noting that Ironwood has indeed had layoffs in the past; it's not clear to me how coupled or uncoupled those layoffs have been to drug failures. 

Well, that's one way to get hired

Via a random set of clickings, I learned today that longshoremen in New York take Good Friday off, as well as a day in March called Gleason's Birthday, in honor of Thomas Gleason, a particularly influential President of the International Longshoremen's Association. From his New York Times obituary:

He always felt that his greatest achievement as president of the I.L.A. was the guaranteed annual income he won for union members, beginning in 1964. This allowed hundreds of longshoremen to collect as much as $32,000 a year for doing no work after their jobs were eliminated by containerization, a process in which goods are shipped in large containers so that the need for workers to load and unload is substantially reduced.  

Although costly, the guaranteed income was preferred by both the shipping industry and the union to the old shape-up when dock work was day labor, when 7 to 10 men would bid for each job each morning and who got the job was often determined by kickbacks and violence.

That doesn't sound very fun.

ACS San Francisco Career Fair: 145 jobs, 459 job seekers

These numbers reported to the ACS Council this morning:

Number of Job Seekers: 459*
Employers: 32
Number of Jobs: 145
Recruiter Booths: 27 

Résumé Reviews: 351
Mock Interviews: 150

There was a change to the way that job seekers were counted, so job seeker/jobs ratios can't be compared anymore.

The job seeker to job ratio is 3.11 to 1; even with the change in how job seekers are counted, the ratio is about typical for an ACS Career Fair. 

Anyone got any good defense stories?

A while back, an inmate in an Atlanta courtroom had a not-so-great conversation with a judge. From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's legal blog: 

The extraordinary hearing, first reported by the Rome News-Tribune, occurred June 17 and lasted about 11 minutes. Allen is accused of beating fellow inmate Stephen Rudolph Nalley to death at the Floyd County Jail in August 2015. 

During the hearing, Allen told Durham he would murder his whole family. “I’ll cut your children up into pieces,” Allen said. “I’ll knock their brains out with a (expletive) hammer and feed them to you. … The babies will be going, ‘Daddy, daddy, help me.’” 

When Durham told Allen he didn’t have any children, Allen said, “Then I’ll get your nieces, your nephews, your sisters.” 

Durham said he had none of those either and told Allen he’d “be in jail so long you won’t have a chance.” 

At the outset of the hearing, when Durham told Allen he couldn’t have a lawyer of his choosing, Allen said he’d then represent himself. But Durham told the defendant “that would be the biggest mistake you’ve ever made in your life.” 

Within minutes, Allen told Durham he would “hold myself in contempt.” 

“Listen to me,” Durham interjected. 

“(Expletive) you,” Allen told the judge and then continued saying the same thing.

The funny part about this situation, of course, is that Mr. Allen did not have much leverage with Judge Durham, and yet decided to berate him.

It reminds me of a question I've always wanted to ask - does anyone have any good stories of exchanges between committee members and graduate students during thesis defenses? I presume there's got to be some good stories of retorts on the part of either graduate students (less likely) or committee members (far more likely.) Readers, do tell.  

Job posting: online community manager, Citrine, Redwood City, CA

From the inbox, an interesting position: 

Citrine is the operating system for advanced materials and chemicals. Our platform ingests and understands large-scale technical data from countless sources—experiments, simulations, manufacturing processes, and research papers—and uses state-of-the-art AI to find patterns in those data to accelerate the next generation of products to market. Citrine is funded by top-tier Silicon Valley venture capital firms including: Data Collective, Innovation Endeavors, Prelude Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, Morado Ventures, Ulu Ventures, and XSeed Capital. 

Position Summary 

Engaging with the university and government materials research community via our Open Citrination platform, the free counterpart to our Enterprise offering, is core to Citrine’s strategy. Citrine's Community Manager will be the driving force behind building community around Open Citrination and making this platform the daily focal point for any materials scientists eager to take their work to the next level with large-scale data analysis. This will require a combination of community outreach, implementation of engagement-building strategies, and close work with internal product and technical teams to ensure that our product roadmap best serves the needs of our community.... 

Skills & Requirements

• Proven ability (2-3 years) to build and maintain communities around online platforms and software products
• Outstanding written and oral communication skills, and a strong desire to engage with the research community on an ongoing basis
• Deep interest in science and scientific communication
• Ability to accommodate extensive travel (up to 75%) to universities, labs, workshops, conferences, and seminars on Citrine’s behalf...

The full ad is here. Best wishes to those interested. 

Warning Letter of the Week: identification edition

In a missive from the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research to Mr. Prashant K. Tewari, the Managing Director of USV Private Limited, an unusual failure mode for a warning letter:

4.    Your firm failed to ensure that laboratory records included complete data derived from all tests necessary to assure compliance with established specifications and standards (21 CFR 211.194(a)).
[Redacted] failed identity testing. You accepted a passing retest result without any investigation of the failed result.

In your response, you state that you attempted to conduct a retrospective investigation of the analysis which occurred more than a year earlier, and tentatively concluded that the out-of-specification (OOS) result might have been caused by analyst error. Also, your investigation recommends replacement of the polarimeter on which the OOS result was obtained.

How do you fail identity testing of a compound? Isn't that just "do the IRs match?" Whoa.  

2017 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List: 585 positions

The 2017 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List (curated mostly by Andrew Spaeth, with minor help from me) has 585 positions.

Have you had a Skype/phone interview or an on-site with a position on the Faculty Jobs List? Please add the date of the interview to the open thread. The open thread is here.

Do you see anything that needs correcting? Please leave a comment in the open thread, or e-mail me at chemjobber@gmail.com

As the 2017 Faculty Jobs Open Thread has gotten longer, the Blogger software that this blog is run on has added a new wrinkle: when you initially load the thread, it loads only the first ~220 comments and then has a "load more" button near the bottom of the page near the comment box. Only after pressing that button about 7 times does it load the latest comments.

A web forum! Because the open thread has gotten more unwieldy, I have opened up this web forum ("Chemistry Faculty Jobs List"). Feel free to join/post!

Finally, a link to See Arr Oh's Chemistry Bumper Cars 2017 edition.

How do you stay positive?

From a couple weeks ago, a longish cri-de-coeur on Reddit from a graduate student that is tired of the grad school game. It also has quite the remarkable quote: 

There is a rather popular Nobel Prize winning professor that likes to describe himself by saying, "Kinetically, I'm an asshole. Thermodynamically, I'm a nice guy."

And then this very good question:

I want to get over the personal nonsense I've had to deal with in the past 5 years, finish strong, and go on to have a promising future... But, I just don't see a way to simultaneously let my love for chemistry take priority, and have the terrible people, social disorders, and marginalization take a back seat. 

So, now, my question directed to all of you is, quite simply, what positive force motivates you? How do you challenge the current, crummy order of things, and overcome it? 

I'd like to think harder about what positive force motivates me, but off the top of my head? What motivates me at work is my regard for my colleagues. I want to see myself as a contributor to the company and to the bottom line; I think that I am. I know that my colleagues are, too. I work for a smallish company and I want to be seen as someone who is reliable, kind, generous and both smart and wise. I try hard at this (most of the time.)

Regarding challenging the current order of things, I think it's not necessarily about 'fighting City Hall' every step of the way, but seeing opportunities where they exist, and taking a risk on being kinder and more generous than people expect.

Readers, what do you think? 

The Postdoc Titling Kerfluffle Continues

Previously, on "The Postdoc Titling Kerfluffle", there was a letter, and then a counter-letter. And now, a second letter in support:

I’m on the side of Andrew Lovinger in viewing that postdocs are not students (C&EN, Feb. 20, page 4). I am a postdoc in a federal lab, but I seem to have an experience similar to other non-postdoc contractors. 

Those who hire postdocs must say it’s an educational, and hence student-like, experience for one simple reason: It makes the postdocs cheaper. If there is no educational benefit, there is no FICA exemption. With the option between one Ph.D. researcher (including Social Security and Medicare taxes, benefits, etc., beyond the salary) or two postdocs (only a stipend) for the same cost, which would you choose? 

In short, I don’t believe postdocs are students, but for tax purposes, it is advantageous for our sponsoring institutions to classify us as such. 

Ian McAninch
Abingdon, Md. 

I have no dog in this fight, but it is fascinating to me that it continues. 

(Is it really true that if there is no educational benefit, there is no FICA exemption?) 

This week's C&EN

A few of the articles from this week's issue of C&EN:

• Cover: Tobin Marks is awarded the Priestley Medal. (profile by Mitch Jacoby) 
• The latest on the science around e-cigarette content (article by Matt Davenport) 
• I'm a little biased, but I am super-stoked about this article about Clean Harbors' new hazardous waste incinerator (article by Jyllian Kemsley) 
• Fascinating new (alkylation? arylation? chemistry from the Nelson group at UCLA (article by Stu Borman)
• Well, I guess the EU is okay with Dow-DuPont... (article by Melody Bomgardner)
• Are there any D-amino acids in the mouse brain? Perhaps not. (article by Louisa Dalton)

U.S. College Grads See Massive Wage Gains Since Recession

Petroleum engineers and basket-weaving majors similarly flush

WASHINGTON (CHEMJOBBER PRESS) The bachelor's degree — long a ticket to middle-class comfort — shinier than ever in the U.S. job market.

Wages for college graduates across many majors have skyrocketed since the 2007-09 recession, according to an unpublished analysis by the Georgetown University Center on Student Loan Penury in Washington using Census bureau figures. Young job-seekers appear to be the biggest winners.

What you study doesn't matter for your salary, the data show. Chemical and computer engineering majors have held down some of the best earnings of at least $60,000 a year for entry level positions since the recession, while business and science graduates's paychecks have risen apace. A basket-weaving major at the start of their career earned $71,000 on an annual average in 2015, up $10,000 from five years earlier.

"It has been like this for the past five, six years now," said Dan Heah, a research professor at Georgetown who compiled the data. "It's really exciting."

The outlook for experienced graduates, aged 35 to 54, is even brighter, with wages rising across the board since the crisis.

The economic premium of a bachelor's increased after the recession, according to a 2016 National Bureau of Economic Research paper by Richard Valens, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

"I don't see what people need to be concerned about," said Dr. Valens. "Surely concerns about stagnant wages, decreasing college wage premiums and increasing tuition costs are figments of fevered imaginations."