Chem Coach: Instrumentician Style

Blog Carnivals are pretty cool and I've been wanting to participate in one since the "Favorite Reactions" carnival. SeeArrOh started this one, calling it the Chem Coach Carnival. The idea is to answer a series of questions about the daily ins and outs of being a professional chemist or student of chemistry in order to lend a hand to those considering getting into the field, or just to encourage those of us who are already here in some capacity. I think it's a great idea and I'll start right here.

Your current job: I'm an analytical chemist at a research institute. I use complex instrumentation to tease out qualitative and quantitative information about particular components in various types of samples. It's a large institute, and we're not all scientists. Even among the scientists there's a lot of diversity, so I get to run things from environmental guys, material scientists, medicinal chemists, all the way down to commercially developed materials and pharmaceuticals. My focus is mass spectrometry for its use in the analysis of tobacco constituents and designer drugs.

What do you do in a standard work day? Really, it could be anything. The particular group that I work in doesn't have just one contract or project that it works with full-time. Recently, my weeks consisted of a day or two of producing tobacco smoke condensate samples and standards, and then popping them into gas chromatography systems to determine how much of what was in them. I've also been using various mass spectral analysis techniques to identify designer drug components on a pretty regular basis. All of this work includes using balances, vials, solvents, and neat chemicals for putting together sample assays, and then time in front of computers telling instrumentation what to look for in them. I do the mechanical work on the instruments as well, so at any given time I may have to replace a gas tank, a copper line, a filter, a capillary column, or even a mass spec source before getting the show on the road. This is all before I come to the crucial data analysis step.

What kind of schooling/training/experience helped you get there? My training started with a great chemistry teacher in high school. Mrs. Swann taught us how to balance equations, what Boyle's law was, and what shapes orbitals had, but more importantly, she got excited about chemistry. After that, a really good undergraduate degree in chemistry (B.S. so I couldn't skimp on the math...even if I still feel like I did) is the only diploma that I've earned so far past high school. I got to take some graduate level courses from older guys that had strong research interests and expressed them well. While in college I worked for 4 years in a biophysics lab learning how to manipulate the surface chemistry of nano- and microparticles. I also interned at a biotherapeutics company for a summer where I learned a little GxP.

How does chemistry inform your work? Methods guys are constantly going to the literature to see if someone's analysed a molecule or substance before them. Sometimes we're looking for a specific method that will separate known compounds. Other times we're searching to see what unknowns should be in our matrix and at what concentrations. There are some chemistry rules that chromatographers and mass spec chemists use right off the top of their heads, like isotope distributions and atomic masses, but often you can find us going to reference books and literature to try and establish what behavior we can expect for a given chemical in a column with some mobile phase.

Finally, a unique, interesting, or funny anecdote about your career: So there's this mass spec thing that Waters developed and they call it an Atmospheric Solids Analysis Probe. It's really cool, because it works a little bit like DART, you can just dip or rub the capillary probe into your substance and stick it into a mass spec source and see what volatilizes off of it. Someone I worked with at the time got a hold of a "lazy cake" one day and we went looking for the melatonin mass in it. I'm not sure if anyone eventually found it, but it was hysterical to let everyone know that we were "mass spec-ing" a brownie.