The Chem Coach Carnival

SeeArrOh has been celebrating National Chemistry Week in the US by hosting a carnival at his JustLikeCooking blog. The Chem Coach theme is designed to “help folks interested in chemistry do what you do”. With over 40 entrants already, this one is a bit late to the party; hopefully there’s still some punch left.

Your current job
Process chemist in pharma.

What you do in a standard "work day"
Depending on the stage of a project, this varies throughout the year, but I’m predominantly lab-based. During route-scouting and early development, I’ll be running dozens of reactions in parallel on a small scale (1-2ml) to look for leads. With multiple samples per reaction, this has a significant analytical burden so HPLC development and troubleshooting skills come in handy. I also get to play with some great software to identify trends in data and bring the results to life (no-one wants to see 200 HPLCs in a presentation!) In later development, I’ll be running a couple of reactions at a time in lab reactors, aiming to mimic how the process will work on plant and gaining process understanding (tweaking variables, profiling reactions, understanding impurity formation, etc). After that, it’s tech transfer for scale-up to either pilot plant (to generate the first few kilos), or to commercial manufacture. The later in the process, the more paperwork there is – but it ensures you have everything you need to scale your process safely and robustly.

What kind of schooling / training / experience helped you get there?
I loved chemistry at school and wanted to learn much more about the subject, so chose to study for a Masters at uni. I hadn’t given too much thought about how this would translate into a career (although I knew I wanted to pursue science) and careers advice boiled down to “read the Prospects Directory” (a monolithic guide to graduate employers). That’s partly why I created this blog – to highlight the alternative careers available to prospective chemistry students/graduates. After a couple of alternative scientific jobs, I made my way to pharma where I could use my education more directly.

How does chemistry inform your work?
I do chemistry every day, so it has a significant impact – from planning and performing organic synthesis to studying rates and mechanism. A lot of process chemistry comes with experience – understanding the factors that are impacted by scale-up, knowing which reagents are available cheaply and on scale, balancing material costs with process costs, environmental and safety considerations… the list goes on! Chemistry, equipment, legislation, etc, also change over time, so there’s always something new to learn or existing processes to improve.

Finally, a unique, interesting, or funny anecdote about your career

To date, I’ve decontaminated 4 labs – either to allow installation of new facilities, or as a result of lab moves. The most memorable of these had the entire lab team wearing full disposable coveralls and gas masks for a week – it was like being in some bizarre 90’s rave video. Fortunately this was a few years before smartphones and YouTube were on the scene…

Graduate Schemes

‘Tis the season to advertise graduate schemes, and Target Jobs seems to be the place to find them. Here’s a selection:

£33k + £3k settling allowance + relocation – BP (closes 28^th Dec)

£29-39k – Schlumberger

£29k – Unilever (23^rd Nov)

£28k + £2k joining bonus – Mars (1^st Nov)

£27.5k + £1.5k joining bonus – British Sugar (31^st Jan ’13)

£27k + £2k allowance – Nestle (3^rd Dec)

£27k + joining bonus – Kraft Foods (9^th Nov)

£25.5-27.5k + £2k joining bonus - Akzo Nobel (31^st Dec)

£25-27k – Civil Service Fast Stream (30^th Nov)

£24.3k – Tata Steel (7^th Jan ‘13)

£23.4-26.3k – Johnson Matthey (31^st Oct)

£23-29k – Tessella (open)

£22.4k – Atomic Weapons Establishment (open all year)

£22.4k + £3k relocation - Croda

With posting light here at the moment, take a look over at SeeArrOh’s website, JustLikeCooking for more inspiration of what can be done with a chemistry degree, or follow along using #ChemCoach on Twitter.

5th October Graduate Jobroll

A quick round-up of other positions available to graduates with little work experience, advertised in the last couple of weeks.

Hertfordshire: Production chemist (£23-25k + shift) to work in a manufacturing environment.

Cambridge: Customer service advisor (£17-18k) for a 1-year contract at a manufacturing company.

Liverpool: Synthetic chemist (£18-20k) with reporting responsibilities.

Dorset: Graduate chemist (£20-25k) to work on electrolytic capacitor technology in the new product development team. R&D chemist (£25-32k) positions are also available for PhD qualified candidates – relevant work experience desirable.

Cambridge: Graduate publishing editor (£23k) at the Royal Society of Chemistry. Degree or PhD required.

3rd October Graduate Jobroll

A collection of industrial placements and graduate schemes (mainly advertised on the RSC’s ChemistryWorldJobs).

Kraft Foods is offering both a rotational graduate scheme and a selection of industrial placements (6 and 12 months available). The adverts are light on detail, but their website offers more information. Graduate schemes are available in 5 key areas – the most relevant to chemists being Research Development & Quality. Within this is the chemistry department, which “offers chemical and physical measurement to characterise composition, functionality and nutritional value.” The starting salary is a healthy £27k (plus a graduate joining bonus), with a minimum of 27 days holiday and other incentives available. Industrial placements pay £16.3k for the year.

Novartis is offering industrial placements at their Institute for Biomedical Research in Horsham. Their website indicates up to 5 one-year placements are available within Global Discovery Chemistry – in the medicinal, large scale, parallel synthesis or exploratory chemistry teams. Also advertised on their site are positions for entry-level graduate medicinal chemists.

Johnson Matthey’s Precious Metals Products division is offering its rotational European graduate programme (£27-30k), open to graduates and postgrads. With the opportunity to rotate across locations in Europe, a second language (German or Dutch) is required. Relevant work experience highly desirable.

The Civil Service Fast Stream has opened for applications to its 2013 intake. Working at “the heart of current affairs and key government agendas”, the graduate fast stream has an option specifically for science and engineering. The four-year programme consists of multiple short placements in the first two years, to gain a broad experience; before undertaking two longer placements over the next two years. Applicants require a 2:2 degree, and the scheme is open to graduates of all ages. With a starting salary of £25-27k, and a potential salary of over £45k on promotion (typically after 4-5 years), this is an incredibly competitive grad scheme. 

The Future of UK Pharma

A recent email from Scientific Update highlighted an interview with their founder, Dr Trevor Laird, in Chemistry & Industry – the monthly magazine from the SCI. Following a question on process chemistry in industry, Dr Laird was asked “And is the future looking positive?” The reply:

I think globally, in the long term, it is. Unfortunately in the UK, with so many redundancies over the last 2 to 3 years, it’s not great, but there’s a lot of expansion in India and China. I think we have to look at all aspects of industry: pharmaceuticals are in the doldrums at the moment, but you never know what’s coming up.

Organic, electronic chemicals for solar energy devices – that might be the next big expansion in fine chemical manufacturing, giving new opportunities to people in the future.

While not a surprise (in a 2010 OPRD editorial, Dr Laird discussed the question “Is there a future for organic chemists in the pharmaceutical industry outside China and India?”), it’s still not good news for UK chemistry graduates who may have been holding onto hope for a recovery in this once-thriving sector. Instead, as pharma companies move further into the outsourcing model, more positions are opening up in contract research or manufacturing organisations (CRO/CMOs).

The suggestion of solar energy as the next potential boon for chemists is an interesting one. Few positions have been advertised in this sector in the last 18 months on the main job boards, but it would be worth investigating which companies carry out research in this area. For those already developing skillsets in pharmaceutical R&D, an alternative, prosperous, industry to consider would be agrochemicals (eg, Syngenta).

Finally, I thought it may be interesting to turn back to OPRD – the excellent industry journal for process chemistry, of which Dr Laird is editor. With more process chemistry being carried out in the Far East, there was the chance that there may be an increase in OPRD papers accepted from this region.

While the data was supportive for 2011/12, a glance at the 2010 abstracts suggested this wasn't a major trend. Whether contracted companies overseas would even be allowed to publish results is questionable. A final word, and another factor that may be at play, comes from Trevor in his 2010 editorial: 

The only good news on this topic is that, as chemists seek to improve their CVs, they are realising that more publications make them more attractive to employers. As a result, they are urgently writing up their work and submitting papers to Organic Process Research & Development (OPRD). This is great for OPRD, but I’m hoping this will also result in positive outcomes for the job hunters.