I'm not even in the region anymore, but, as this entry's title suggests, I'm still mad at myself for missing an opportunity at my last job in Small State University (SSU). The school is a Midwestern school not far from St. Louis and they have a weekly visiting talk schedule for the Chemistry department. I used to love going to those things, but I guess the fact that I wasn't actually doing any real chemistry sorta put me out of the mood of attending and I ended up never making a talk (I know...this was dumb of me and I regret it).
While there, I knew in the back of my mind, that Paul Bracher of ChemBark (I hope that he doesn't mind me linking here...or on the sidebar, for that matter!) wasn't far away, in SLU, and would probably make an interesting speaker. I even considered suggesting him to the schedulers, but eventually just didn't do it. Toward the end of the semester, a couple months before our recent move, I ended up checking the schedule out to see who was coming next, out of curiosity, and guess who I had just missed a month or so before: Paul Bracher.
So there you have it: KEEP UP WITH YOUR SCHEDULES! If I had just paid a little more attention and remained active with the easily-accessible talks scheduled by my own department, I'd have been able to meet a pretty important member of the chemistry blogging community. Hopefully that won't be my last opportunity to meet Dr. Bracher, but he has already taken part in teaching me a lesson, it seems. :(
Saturday, June 18, 2016
Thursday, June 2, 2016
Homelab
I've never been an advocate of doing much chemistry at home and there are a variety of reasons that I don't, beyond the obvious danger of working with hazardous materials in an environment that may not have appropriate safety equipment available. I won't go into the reasons here and have generally learned to keep quiet whenever this comes up due to how many scientists (and particularly "would-be scientists") enjoy the romanticism of a wild-west research (chemopunk?) scenario. I can't say that I have never felt that feeling before, especially when it comes to doing a little analytical chemistry.
There would be a lot of opportunities if you had the right equipment and that equipment sitting in people's homes is exactly what I want to ask about. Do you know of anyone with old (or new!) instruments sitting in their homes? Do they run? Are they ever in use?
I've heard stories of people keeping older instruments in their garage after a company dissolves or when they leave a teaching job, since the instrument's owner wasn't actually the institution. I've actually been offered a couple of fringe instruments over the years but never thought that I had the room for them myself. I think that my wife would agree, particularly when we move! Maybe the most interesting story I was ever told was the two analytical chemists, one I had briefly worked with, had a functioning MALDI-TOF in their garage. The storyteller even claimed that they'd fired it up once or twice and verified that it worked, making their garage a temporary mass spec lab. Pretty cool, but I wouldn't want to deal with the upkeep, I'm sure.
Comment and tell me the stories you've heard or been a part of. I only have a low powered microscope at my house right now, but who knows, maybe I could work my way up to a spectrophotometer one day!
There would be a lot of opportunities if you had the right equipment and that equipment sitting in people's homes is exactly what I want to ask about. Do you know of anyone with old (or new!) instruments sitting in their homes? Do they run? Are they ever in use?
I've heard stories of people keeping older instruments in their garage after a company dissolves or when they leave a teaching job, since the instrument's owner wasn't actually the institution. I've actually been offered a couple of fringe instruments over the years but never thought that I had the room for them myself. I think that my wife would agree, particularly when we move! Maybe the most interesting story I was ever told was the two analytical chemists, one I had briefly worked with, had a functioning MALDI-TOF in their garage. The storyteller even claimed that they'd fired it up once or twice and verified that it worked, making their garage a temporary mass spec lab. Pretty cool, but I wouldn't want to deal with the upkeep, I'm sure.
Comment and tell me the stories you've heard or been a part of. I only have a low powered microscope at my house right now, but who knows, maybe I could work my way up to a spectrophotometer one day!
Wednesday, June 1, 2016
Two Years in the Midwest
When I last posted to this blog, I was still working in the Southeast at a nonprofit research institute, maintaining about six LC-MS/MS and GC-MS instruments. Most of the work that I'd been doing, when I wasn't maintaining those instruments, was small molecule work. I worked with tobacco, some biologicals, bulk materials, and designer drug projects, the last being a pretty interesting Pyrolysis-GC-MS project. Then I left.
My wife got a tenure-track job at a small Midwestern liberal arts University and I decided that I would follow her if she wanted to pursue it. It took a little deliberation, but, ultimately, we did decide to head out. I leapt and, while I did look, I didn't know where I would land. I interviewed for a position preparing materials for the school's biology labs, but decided against taking the job after learning that I'd have to help run experiments with an animal colony. I don't have any ethical issues with it, but I didn't want to do that. I still wish that I had learned some microbiology techniques, but that's history now.
After turning down the job, I was told about an opening in Chemistry for a similar job, but without live animal work. I took the job and have been there since. I was able to help them out with a couple of instruments and even got to set up a student on a GC-MS for a research project. Beyond that, I was on the outside of the analytical chemistry bubble as far as my professional career was concerned. I kept up with my ASMS membership and kept my hopes up about being able to get back into the field later and it looks like I'm going to see exactly how possible that is in the near future.
My wife and I have known for a little while now that we wanted to move back to the Southeast, ideally near our common alma mater, but with both of us working at full-capacity, something that I was only sort of able to do in the Midwest (something that was not the university's fault; I will always be grateful for the opportunity that they provided for me). After surviving a white-knuckle academic hiring season, she wound up with a surprise opportunity at a great school in our target region and now we are nearly packed to move there and we are beyond excited. The new job puts us in a mid-sized city and will provide a lot more amenities than our small Midwestern town. I'll also be in my home state, something that I'm happy about, and analytical chemistry jobs will be available there.
I don't know exactly what type of job to expect after not really working in a professional lab for a couple of years. I do, however, already have an interview in a mass spec lab, so I'm optimistic. It's also spurred a great deal of renewed enthusiasm for analytical chemistry and science communication, so hopefully I can "ride the wave" a little and write more here. In any case, it feels good to know that the years of experience in my last lab weren't entirely wasted after leaving for a couple of years. Maybe that's some anecdotal data that a working chemist out there could benefit from. I'll try and remember to post the interview results as I get them.
My wife got a tenure-track job at a small Midwestern liberal arts University and I decided that I would follow her if she wanted to pursue it. It took a little deliberation, but, ultimately, we did decide to head out. I leapt and, while I did look, I didn't know where I would land. I interviewed for a position preparing materials for the school's biology labs, but decided against taking the job after learning that I'd have to help run experiments with an animal colony. I don't have any ethical issues with it, but I didn't want to do that. I still wish that I had learned some microbiology techniques, but that's history now.
After turning down the job, I was told about an opening in Chemistry for a similar job, but without live animal work. I took the job and have been there since. I was able to help them out with a couple of instruments and even got to set up a student on a GC-MS for a research project. Beyond that, I was on the outside of the analytical chemistry bubble as far as my professional career was concerned. I kept up with my ASMS membership and kept my hopes up about being able to get back into the field later and it looks like I'm going to see exactly how possible that is in the near future.
My wife and I have known for a little while now that we wanted to move back to the Southeast, ideally near our common alma mater, but with both of us working at full-capacity, something that I was only sort of able to do in the Midwest (something that was not the university's fault; I will always be grateful for the opportunity that they provided for me). After surviving a white-knuckle academic hiring season, she wound up with a surprise opportunity at a great school in our target region and now we are nearly packed to move there and we are beyond excited. The new job puts us in a mid-sized city and will provide a lot more amenities than our small Midwestern town. I'll also be in my home state, something that I'm happy about, and analytical chemistry jobs will be available there.
I don't know exactly what type of job to expect after not really working in a professional lab for a couple of years. I do, however, already have an interview in a mass spec lab, so I'm optimistic. It's also spurred a great deal of renewed enthusiasm for analytical chemistry and science communication, so hopefully I can "ride the wave" a little and write more here. In any case, it feels good to know that the years of experience in my last lab weren't entirely wasted after leaving for a couple of years. Maybe that's some anecdotal data that a working chemist out there could benefit from. I'll try and remember to post the interview results as I get them.
Monday, May 12, 2014
We Eventually Find Chemists Wherever We Look!
Today's Google doodle links to information about the Nobel Laureate Dorothy Hodgkin, a British chemist who contributed to the advancement of x-ray crystallography. This has been a really important field, and her work definitely deserves the mention from the doodle. A cool thing that happens when you click on one of these, of course, is the inevitable wikipedia-linking that follows from reading parts of the article on the subject. I quickly saw on the side of the article that Margaret Thatcher was once a student of Hodgkin's. I'm sure this is, or was, common knowledge to people that had more reason to know about Thatcher, but it wasn't for me. I find it fascinating when people doing big things in an unrelated field got their professional start as a chemist. I would say that this speaks to the way chemists have to think about problems, but you could make that argument about a lot of careers. In any case, Thatcher apparently held a pretty interesting alternative chemjob. I know that the current Pope and Angela Merkel also hold pretty cool alt-chemjobs. I wonder who I'll find out about next.
Monday, February 25, 2013
How Would You Like Your Science?
The employment of chemists, and scientists more generally, has come about through various means in the history of the profession. The earliest chemists were likely those employed by royalty and the mourning to embalm the dead in ancient Egypt. Several important scientists have been gentleman scientists. Boyle, Darwin, and Bacon were all able to fund their own experiments for whatever ideas happened to roll into their heads. Fritz Haber was one of many chemists employed for making weapons for the government. Henry Louis Le Chatelier along with many more modern chemists was paid by a school to teach the subject of chemistry and physical science. Still, there are chemists that are paid by companies to solve particular problems that the company deems important.
What exactly am I getting at? Well, there are a lot of different ways that scientists have made money over the years, and some didn't make any money through science at all. Even successful scientists sometimes made their discoveries simply for the pursuit of knowledge, if they could afford it. I think many scientists want to experiment, as long as it can be paid for. Grants and contacts can be really hard to come by, though. It's also a little strange that most of the money for scientific experiments come through taxes. Taxes are good, because it means that we all pay for research that benefits us, whether we realize that we should pay for it or not. On the other hand, when we pay taxes, we don't get much say on where, specifically, that money goes. I might want all of my money to go to colon cancer research instead of tobacco addiction, but the priority is ultimately set by the government.
I could go around to my local university and hand a check over to the graduate students running the experiment I think will benefit society the most. Maybe each of us could do that. We could possibly even convince some friends to help us out. Really, these small numbers would never amount to enough to affect a project. On the other hand, the scale that crowdfunding lends to the effort can really make things happen. Kickstarter has shown some recent success by allowing crowd funding to pay for an Oscar-winning movie. It only seems reasonable that science could be paid for in a similar way. There's now an answer just for that: Microryza.
This is pretty cool. Crowd funding seems like it might be a silly thing to do. There's a lot behind the argument that we pay for science through taxes because we just wouldn't do it otherwise. That being said, a tool like this allows those of us interested in research (and with a little extra scratch) could make our priorities known. If you have a special place in your heart for improved resolving power in UPLC columns, give a group a push. Maybe you want some extra money to flow towards natural products research looking in a wild new source - BAM! Cold, hard, electron-coded cash.
In the end, I think what would make a lot of us the happiest is to perform experiments that someone feels are important. Maybe it helps us feel like the experiments are important. Whatever the case, research institutes that have good ideas and capable, gloved hands should try reaching out for some crowd funding. This thing may or may not work out. It's new and that sort of thing sometimes happens to new ideas. Maybe, though, our society is mature enough to start letting its individual members pick what research they think is important.
What exactly am I getting at? Well, there are a lot of different ways that scientists have made money over the years, and some didn't make any money through science at all. Even successful scientists sometimes made their discoveries simply for the pursuit of knowledge, if they could afford it. I think many scientists want to experiment, as long as it can be paid for. Grants and contacts can be really hard to come by, though. It's also a little strange that most of the money for scientific experiments come through taxes. Taxes are good, because it means that we all pay for research that benefits us, whether we realize that we should pay for it or not. On the other hand, when we pay taxes, we don't get much say on where, specifically, that money goes. I might want all of my money to go to colon cancer research instead of tobacco addiction, but the priority is ultimately set by the government.
I could go around to my local university and hand a check over to the graduate students running the experiment I think will benefit society the most. Maybe each of us could do that. We could possibly even convince some friends to help us out. Really, these small numbers would never amount to enough to affect a project. On the other hand, the scale that crowdfunding lends to the effort can really make things happen. Kickstarter has shown some recent success by allowing crowd funding to pay for an Oscar-winning movie. It only seems reasonable that science could be paid for in a similar way. There's now an answer just for that: Microryza.
This is pretty cool. Crowd funding seems like it might be a silly thing to do. There's a lot behind the argument that we pay for science through taxes because we just wouldn't do it otherwise. That being said, a tool like this allows those of us interested in research (and with a little extra scratch) could make our priorities known. If you have a special place in your heart for improved resolving power in UPLC columns, give a group a push. Maybe you want some extra money to flow towards natural products research looking in a wild new source - BAM! Cold, hard, electron-coded cash.
In the end, I think what would make a lot of us the happiest is to perform experiments that someone feels are important. Maybe it helps us feel like the experiments are important. Whatever the case, research institutes that have good ideas and capable, gloved hands should try reaching out for some crowd funding. This thing may or may not work out. It's new and that sort of thing sometimes happens to new ideas. Maybe, though, our society is mature enough to start letting its individual members pick what research they think is important.
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Happy Mole Day!
Not a full post, I just didn't want Mole Day to pass and not give it some notice. 10-23 is a nice day this year, positioned right in the National Week of Chemistry and SeeArrOh's ChemCoach blog carnival. While we admire our favorite number on this special day, let's not forget about Amadeo Avogadro. His exploration into Avogadro's law got us well on the way to the ideal gas law, the first law that you really got the hang of in chemistry classes, and then learned was all screwed up and needed a lot more work to really use. This one's for you, Amedeo:
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