Tag Archives: Chemistry Careers

Navigating the Rocky Coastlines of the Chemical Business

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[Note: Formerly named “PhD Chemists are freaks!!,” this essay has been renamed to better match the content.]

Preamble: Yes, yes, yes. Obviously, I’m aware that my experience in no way represents the careers of nearly all chemists. As usual, I drift into adjacent chemistry topics. Get your hands away from the keyboard and just read.

Bud (a pseudonym), a PhD chemist consultant and coworker, claimed that people with the exalted PhD degree were freaks of nature. Bud opined “Just look at us! Who goes to school for as long as we did and then ends up in a place like this?” I didn’t add at that moment that between a BA, PhD, 2-year postdoc and a stint in the professor trade, I was in academics for 16 years and walked away from it. Just then I couldn’t defend how smart it might have been to tread down this path only to end up in an old office trailer where we were sitting at that moment.

Bud used to argue that PhDs in general were freaks in society. Only a small fraction of undergrads will go on to grad school and fewer still complete a PhD program. The fraction is smaller yet in the general population.

In science you need a PhD in order to have even a hope of leading an R&D project, technical C-Suite corporate position, institute or professorship. The degree isn’t intended to resemble a trade, but rather to be a highly educated scholar and a subject matter expert with good communication skills and a sharp mind. If one is investigating for new phenomena, an intimate knowledge of known phenomena is needed to discriminate a finding. No awards for rediscovery.

Bud retired from a career at a big chemical corporation only to jump back into the hairball as a sales consultant for us in his retirement. I was a couple of years into what would be my major career “choice” and was managing the sales & marketing department then. Somehow, I had stumbled into the business side.

Our other sales consultant, the “Great Gondini”, retired from a photocopier company as a PhD chemist developing magnetic media, charge transfer agents and other xerographic-related materials. From his soapbox he advised us to-

Avoid being a chemist in a non-chemical-oriented company.

It’s not that non-chemical-company chemists couldn’t rise up the career ladder, but being in a niche subspecialty at a company that produced photocopiers was not the way to grow your career in chemistry. Often such a chemist may be the only chemistry PhD on site and is likely to suffer from professional isolation. Experience with project execution on time and on budget is a great way to rise in a company. Engineers frequently rise to top level positions because they understand technology AND quantitative economics.

The universe for a chemist is 2-dimensional- space vs time. For an engineer, the universe is 3-dimensional- space vs time vs costs. Who would you appoint to manage construction, install new process equipment or run your business?

I knew 2 BS/BA level chemists and 1 PhD level chemist who obtained MBAs. Their careers leapt into higher gear with their move to the business side. In business it is important for at least someone to understand how finance works in addition to the technology. Even graduating with a business minor might be helpful but not as much as an MBA. I got an A in ECON 101 but only I cared. Education in basic accounting is very helpful on the business side.

As I see it, some realities of being in industrial chemistry R&D.

In my organic-synthesis-oriented research group in grad school, the big dream was to get an R&D job in pharma R&D. Cool medicinal chemistry and a chance to help to cure disease for the benefit of mankind. It is an honorable and, if I may be permitted to say so, prestigious career as a pharmaceutical scientist. At least in the world of chemistry.

Since then, more than a few in my grad school cohort had been laid off by the pharma companies or joined another. A few have been laid off 3 times from what they believed were secure slots. Pharma companies, like most others, aren’t run by chemists for the most part. Quarterly EBITDA is a major driver for the board of directors. The C-Suites are packed with corporate and patent lawyers, retired CEOs, MBAs, Md/PhDs, CPA finance people and perhaps a PhD chemist heading up the R&D operation as a Director or Vice-President.

After all, the most important reaction in all of chemistry is transforming chemicals into money.

After my academic career and my short rotation through the polymer world, I ended up for 6 years in chemical sales and marketing which was limited by my personal geographic requirement of living in the mountainous western US. As my opinion of the pharma business matured, I discovered that, as a raw material vendor, to be ever so careful with pharma customer promises and purchase orders. Not because they are liars, but because many felt free to cancel orders even after bulk raw materials arrived and after our R&D effort to meet specs. Their interest in us was based on using our low bid to leverage another supplier on price. This is common actually and I have done it myself. They waved future business in our faces knowing that, probably, they would never send receive an invoice. Still, not unheard of. But the hassle and our wasted R&D and opportunity costs were especially galling. But we were a spot supplier and susceptible to such disruption. My company didn’t like to sign contracts at that time, so we always took the risk on spot buys. Spot sales gave us manufacturing flexibility as a custom chemical producer, but at the expense of uncertainty. Later, attracted by the same sweet songs of Lorali that led hapless sailors into the rocks, we would repeat this fool’s errand once more.

Off-topic advice

Always be certain that the qualification sample you ship to a potential customer is NOT the purest sample that R&D can produce. It must be representative of what the scaled-up process can deliver. Otherwise, you may be stuck having to reproduce lab results at larger scale which can be very problematic. They will often spec-out your product at the purity of the sample. Then you have to live with it or decline the business.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming

On one occasion a big pharma customer wanted a product delivered across the Atlantic to Ireland. Time and distance weren’t the issue, though. It would equilibrate and precipitate below about 15 oC on the transatlantic voyage, so we bought heated shipping containers and installed them in Ireland on a site that wasn’t afraid of the W (indicating a water-reactive hazard) on the hazard labels or the safety data sheets. Scheduling heated transport could be sketchy in fall, winter and spring because most were booked for shipping fruits and vegetables. So, a month into the campaign and after an encouraging site visit by two of us sales guys (Tipperary isn’t so far after all), I received a call saying that they had changed their process (!?) and that a competing European supplier was chosen to ship directly from the continent on demand and without the (our) expense of staging heated storage. Once a pharma company writes in each raw material into their drug filing, changing suppliers or a change in specifications requires the heavens to open up and thunder “make it so.” In the end, they reimbursed us for raw material costs only. &#$@%*&^!! This would happen again later but with a more difficult product to produce.

My early career path led me away from the fabulous pharma world and into undergraduate teaching, initially. The other group members achieved their goals of a pharma R&D position. While I spent the next 6 years in academia one way or another, my grad school colleagues were drawing big salaries with 401(k)s in well-equipped labs, but in locations on the US East Coast, Gulf Coast or Midwest- regions that I would never consider moving to. In the end, most buoyantly bobbled up the career ladder to become directors and vice-presidents of R&D or technology as their final positions. No disrespect, just envy.

Climbing the Career Ladder

A few talented chemist colleagues from grad school climbed up the corporate ladder without business training, learning what they need on the job. Most others, though, remained in the tech end. The reality of being a scientist in industry is that upward mobility in a large corporation very much depends on your improvements in job performance, profitability, volume or especially the successful execution of a capital project. But capital projects are normally given to engineers because they are trained to deal with the cost of the equipment and in the cost of operation.

In my experience, a BA/BS, MA/MS or PhD chemist can usually retire as a senior bench chemist, analyst or lab project leader managing bench chemists. If you enjoy lab work, this is it. By retirement you’ve already topped out on the salary scale and have put away a fair sum in the 401 (k). It is a good life for a great many. But for myself, my interest in bench work dropped from hot to tepid after my 2-year postdoc. I got into molecular modeling and dynamics as a postdoc and actually answered a vexing question about kinetic vs thermodynamic control in a reaction that gave contradictory results. Even got a JACS paper out of it. It was fascinating stuff, but it made me look away from straight synthetic chemistry long enough to appreciate computational and physical chemistry.

As a postdoc I used AMBER and SPARTAN, I did molecular dynamics and molecular mechanics to make a stab what was possibly the global minimum strain energy. Ring strain calculations were used as a coarse screen for potential comonomers for the ring-opening polymerization (OP) reaction we were hoping to commercialize. The homopolymer was amber colored, brittle and rattled when handled as film. The comonomer idea based on the notion that the homopolymer contained too much crystallinity. The glass transition temperature needed to be at least below room temp. Suppressing the crystallinity and retaining certain key properties along with biodegradability was crucial. Even worse, the proposed comonomer must participate in reactive extrusion with the original monomer and be available in commercial quantities at a low cost. Finally, the copolymer needed to be water white. The color spec was difficult to achieve.

Final Comments:

My comments in this essay are based on personal experiences in my world. Your world is almost certainly quite different.

I haven’t mentioned analytical chemists because their world continues to be overtaken by automated instrumentation that will calculate the results and put together a report for you. Sampling and wet chemistry are still hands-on operations as far as I can tell. But this is taken as a challenge to instrument makers who will try to engineer around the hands-on requirement to provide something that can be automated. In my world I see more employee turnover with BA/BS analytical chemists than with organic R&D chemists.

As far as employee turnover goes, analysts are under continuous pressure to produce results so that production can proceed or to get product out the door. With hundreds of raw mats, intermediates, and final products, each with their own standard test methods and specs, I certainly wouldn’t last long as an analytical chemist.

For Students. Thoughts on Chemical Process Scale-Up.

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Chemical process scale-up is a product development activity where a chemical or physical transformation is transferred from the laboratory to another location where larger equipment is used to run the operation at a larger scale. That is, the chemistry advances to bigger pots and pans, commonly of metal construction and with non-scientists running the process. A common sequence of development for a fine chemical batch operation in a suitably equipped organization might go as follows: Lab, kilo lab, pilot plant, production scale. This is an idealized sequence that depends on the product and value.

Scale-up is where an optimized and validated chemical experimental procedure is taken out of the hands of R&D chemists and placed in the care of people who may adapt it to the specialized needs of large scale processing. There the scale-up folks may scale it up unchanged or more likely apply numerous tweaks to increase the space yield (kg product per liter of reaction mass), minimize the process time, minimize side products, and assure that the process will produce product on spec the first time with a maximum profit margin.

The path to full-scale processing depends on management policy as well. A highly risk-averse organization may make many runs at modest scale to assure quality and yield. Other organizations may allow the jump from lab bench to 50, 200, or more gallons, depending on safety and economic risk.

Process scale-up outside of the pharmaceutical industry is not a very standardized activity that is seamlessly transferable from one organization to another. Unit operations like heating, distillation, filtration, etc., are substantially the same everywhere. What differs is administration of this activity and the details of construction. Organizations have unique training programs, SOP’s, work instructions, and configurations of the physical plant. Even dead common equipment like a jacketed reactor will be plumbed into the plant and supplied with unique process controls, safety systems and heating/cooling capacity. A key element of scale-up is adjusting the process conditions to fit the constraints of the production equipment. Another element is to run just a few batches at full scale rather than many smaller scale reactions. Generally it costs only slightly more in manpower to run one large batch than a smaller batch, but will give a smaller cost per kilogram.

Every organization has a unique collection of equipment, utilities, product and process history, permits, market presence, and most critically, people. An organization is limited in a significant way by the abilities and experiences of the staff who can use the process equipment in a safe and profitable manner. Rest assured that every chemist, every R&D group, and every plant manager will have a bag of tricks they will turn to first to tackle a problem. Particular reagents, reaction parameters, solvents, or handling and analytical techniques will find favor for any group of workers. Some are fine examples of professional practice and are usually protected under trade secrecy. Other techniques may reveal themselves to be anecdotal and unfounded in reality. “It’s the way we’ve always done it” is a confounding attitude that may take firm hold of an organization. Be wary of anecdotal information. Define metrics and collect data.

Chemical plants perform particular chemical transformations or handle certain materials as the result of a business decision. A multi-purpose plant will have an equipment list that includes pots and pans of a variety of functions and sizes and be of general utility. The narrower the product list, the narrower the need for diverse equipment. A plant dedicated to just one or a few products will have a bare minimum of the most cost effective equipment for the process.

Scale-up is a challenging and very interesting activity that chemistry students rarely hear about in college. And there is little reason they should. While there is usually room in graduation requirements with the ACS standardized chemistry curriculum, industrial expertise among chemistry faculty is rare. A student’s academic years in chemistry are about the fundamentals of the 5 domains of the chemical sciences: Physical, inorganic, organic, analytical, and biochemistry. A chemistry degree is a credential stating that the holder is broadly educated in the field and is hopefully qualified to hold an entry level position in an organization. A business minor would be a good thing.

The business of running reactions at a larger scale puts the chemist in contact with the engineering profession and with the chemical supply chain universe. Scale-up activity involves the execution of reaction chemistry in larger scale equipment, greater energy inputs/outputs, and the application of engineering expertise. Working with chemical engineers is a fascinating experience. Pay close attention to them.

Who do you call if you want 5 kg or 5 metric tons of a starting material? Companies will have supply chain managers who will search for the chemicals with the specifications you define. Scale-up chemists may be involved in sourcing to some extent. Foremost, raw material specifications must be nailed down. Helpful would be some idea of the sensitivity of a process to impurities in the raw material. You can’t just wave your hand and specify 99.9 % purity. Wouldn’t that be nice. There is such a thing as excess purity and you’ll pay a premium for it. For the best price you have to determine what is the lowest purity that is tolerable. If it is only solvent residue, that may be simpler. But if there are side products or other contaminants you must decide whether or not they will be carried along in your process. Once you pick a supplier, you may be stuck with them for a very long time.

Finally, remember that the most important reaction in all of chemistry is the one where you turn chemicals into money. That is always the imperative.

Learnings from a career in chemistry.

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I will be retiring from industrial chemistry in early 2023. Retirement has snuck up on me, to be honest. I suppose like most 64 year-olds I have trouble recognizing myself in the mirror. The joys and battle scars from my youthful early career are still fresh in my memory even as I turn the corner into the doddering years. I still recall most of the sights and smells and people in the years leading up to the present. I was lucky to meet many good people and unlucky enough to encounter a few problematic jerks. One of my earliest lessons was that not every scientist is one of your brethren. Science contains a bell curve of people- skewed to the good side for the most part, but there are always toxic characters around seemingly bent on making life difficult.

My entry into chemistry was a bit of an accident. I entered college as a physics major and Air Force ROTC minor at the age of 22. Naively I thought that my freshly issued pilots license and an intended physics degree would grease the skids into a flying career in USAF. Boy was I wrong. If anything there was palpable contempt for the pilots certificate. The curious attitude was if you didn’t learn to fly in the USAF then you weren’t shit. Turns out that I was also nearsighted so I was automatically disqualified from a pilot slot. My view in turn became that if you can’t fly jets why be in the USAF?

I took freshman chemistry in the summer for the physics major, then in the fall of my freshman year I started organic chemistry just out of curiosity. I was always puzzled about how drugs work and organic chemistry seemed to be the key. It turned out that organic chemistry was uniquely suitable for my type of ape brain. Soon I switched to a chemistry major and out of ROTC and never looked back at the smoldering crater of my flying career. That said, airplanes are still a passion of mine.

From this end of my career I can look back and see some mistakes I made in the past. First, while I chose a good PhD advisor, I may have aimed too low for the postdoc. It limited my opportunities for a better academic career. Always aim high.

I had a succession of four (count ’em) 1-year sabbatical replacement jobs before I got a tenure track slot at a small midwestern college (with an NMR). One year into my tenure track academic position I drove my career straight into a tree by having an escalating argument with the tenured chemistry department chair. After a long and successful career before my arrival, he tragically became a drunk and a failure in the classroom, he came to treat department faculty with disrespect and was an autocrat. All of this was well known in the department. My mistake in handling the personality conflict was to push a little too hard for near term change in department norms rather than playing the long game by waiting for his retirement. Unfortunately there was no support from the Dean despite the chair’s history of bad behavior. Seeing no help from admin, at Christmas break of the second year I took the first industry job offer I got and left the college. There was no hope for a new contract. I consider this episode to be my fault entirely for not being savvy enough to play the politics right. It was a mistake I would not make again. Oh yes, he died a year after I left.

Lesson No. 1. Learn to engage in politics calmly and ethically. Be patient and smart about it. Abstaining entirely from politics is the politics of victimhood. Like the old saying goes, if you put two people in a room you have politics. If it’s going to happen anyway, you may as well be good at it.

Believing that my teaching resume was fatally disfigured by this absurd episode, I resolved to move into industry. I joined a startup company that was bringing out new technology for commodity-scale polylactic acid (PLA). I was hired to find new catalysts for the cyclodimerization of lactic acid to lactide (the monomer) and comonomers that would lower the glass transition temperature of PLA. PLA homopolymer has a high glass transition temperature that leads to brittleness under ambient conditions. It was a great job and I took a fancy to polymer chemistry. Unfortunately, 11 months after I joined the company folded and I was on the street. Bringing a new polymer into the market at the commodity scale requires a powerful position in the polymer market which we didn’t have. Worse, we had persistent problems with low molecular weight as the money was running out.

Lesson No. 2. Beware the siren song of startup companies. They often fail.

Losing an academic job and an industrial one in a short interval had me eating a big slice of humble pie. These were dark times. In order to feed the family I took a job as an apprentice electrician working commercial construction sites. I had a good boss and the work was interesting. This phase lasted 6 months.

Not wanting to move across the country again I looked for a local job as a PhD chemist. They were scarce. Passing by pharmaceuticals, I took a risk and got a job in chemical sales at a small local chemical plant. Initially I assumed that my career as a scientist was over. As it turned out, that wasn’t true. Most of the chemistry there was multistep organic synthesis so I fit right in. This job would put my chemistry education to use in ways I hadn’t anticipated. We had diverse customers scattered across the world and marketing and customer sales and service required more than just a conversant level of chemistry knowledge in this small market. Very often being able to speak with equal confidence to both scientists and purchasing managers was a necessary skill in making the sale. And the job required some travel to far flung locations which was very stimulating.

Lesson 3. Don’t assume that your career should look like your dissertation project. Be open to possibilities.

Along the lines of Lesson 3, it is worth mentioning that in the course of a chemistry career the chemist might run into the choice of remaining in the lab or transitioning into the business end. The chemical industry requires some business leaders to have a knowledge of chemistry. This should be obvious. The problem is that relatively few chemists enter the job market with solid business credentials. By contrast, chemical engineers evolve their careers by solving chemical manufacturing problems and designing projects within very tight economic constraints. Whereas chemical scientists have a world view that mainly has two axes- space and time- engineers see the world in terms of 3 axes- space, time, and economics. Engineers are trained to bring capital projects in on time and within budget. This facility with projects and economics provides for the facile promotion of engineers to top management positions. My observation is that lab chemists without training in business generally seem to have less career buoyancy than engineers within chemical organizations. Of course there are exceptions. An MBA for a chemist can have real value in upward mobility and lifetime earnings. I’ve seen it happen numerous times.

Lesson 4. The world of chemical business is very interesting and challenging. Give it some consideration.

One way to migrate from the lab to an executive level for a chemist is to become a chief technology officer. This can be a very consequential position in an organization bearing a heavy load of responsibilities. Executive level chemistry jobs can take you into the thin air of business development and the chance to work with a large assortment of executives and managers from other organizations. It is worth aspiring to.

Lesson 5. Polymer chemistry is very interesting. For all you small molecule people out there, try it. You might like it.

But with all of this said, my view now is that I should have tried harder for a flying job in the airlines.