Strategies for Success as an Industrial Chemist

Chemists find careers in the chemical industry very rewarding. The focus is on applied chemistry and in delivering solutions that meet customer needs, whether the customers are other industrial companies or individual consumers. Chemistry provides solutions to the global challenges facing our society, including the need for clean water, nutritious food, improved healthcare and wellness, affordable housing, and sustainable infrastructure. Within industry, chemists serve in a wide variety of roles. The largest fraction may be in research and development (R&D), although opportunities in manufacturing, technical service and development, supply chain, marketing, intellectual property protection, sales and commercial functions, and many other options are also open to chemists who want to apply their skills [1]. I was drawn to a career in industry because I’m results oriented and I wanted my work to be applied immediately and have an impact.

Strategies for success as an industrial chemist

There are multiple factors that contribute to the success of an industrial chemist. In addition to technical knowledge, business acumen and interprofessional skills are required for growth and advancement. The technical expertise that is developed through formal training cannot stagnate; continuous learning is required to remain relevant and drive innovation. Business acumen refers to understanding not only the company’s competitive advantage and financial picture but also the value proposition for your department and yourself. Interprofessional skills, the ability to communicate and work effectively with others, are critical since many industrial projects are multidisciplinary and cross-functional. Recommendations for development in all three areas are described.

Chemists Who Work in Industry

Dr. Dorothy J. Phillips (Fig. 2.1) is a retired industrial chemist and a member of the Board of Directors of the ACS. Dorothy Jean Wingfield was born in Nashville, Tennessee on July 27, 1945, the third of eight children, five girls and three boys. She was the second girl and is very close to her older sister. Dorothy grew up in a multi- generational home as both her grandmothers often lived with them. Her father, Reverend Robert Cam Wingfield Sr., born in 1905, was a porter at the Greyhound Bus station and went to school in the evenings after he was called to the ministry. He was very active in his church as the superintendent of the Sunday school; he became a pastor after receiving an associate’s degree in theology and pastoral studies from the American Baptist Theological Seminary. Her mother, Rebecca Cooper Wingfield, occasionally did domestic work. On these occasions, Dorothy’s maternal grandmother would take care of the children. Dorothy’s mother was also very active in civic and school activities, attending the local meetings and conferences of the segregated Parent Teachers Association (PTA) called the Negro Parent Teachers Association or Colored PTA. For that reason, she was frequently at the schools to talk with her children’s teachers. She also worked on a social issue with the city to move people out of the dilapidated slum housing near the Capitol. The town built government subsidized housing to relocate people from homes which did not have indoor toilets and electricity. She was also active in her Baptist church as a Mother, or Deaconess, counseling young women, especially about her role as the minister’s wife. When Dorothy went to school in 1951, Nashville schools were segregated and African American children went to the schools in their neighborhoods. But Dorothy’s elementary, junior high, and high schools were segregated even though the family lived in a predominately white neighborhood. This was because around 1956, and after Rosa Park’s bus boycott in Montgomery, AL, her father, like other ministers, became more active in civil rights and one of his actions was to move to a predominately white neighborhood.

Balla, Giacomo (1871–1958)

Giacomo Balla was an Italian painter and an important exponent of Futurism. He began his career as a self-taught artist; he inherited a passion for photography from his father, an industrial chemist as well as an amateur photographer. During his stays in Turin, Rome, and Paris, Balla gained experience at various academies and inspired many young people eager for modernity, including Boccioni and Severini.

Thatcher, Scientist

This paper has two halves. First, I piece together what we know about Margaret Thatcher's training and employment as a scientist. She took science subjects at school; she studied chemistry at Oxford, arriving during World War II and coming under the influence (and comment) of two excellent women scientists, Janet Vaughan and Dorothy Hodgkin. She did a fourth-year dissertation on X-ray crystallography of gramicidin just after the war. She then gathered four years' experience as a working industrial chemist, at British Xylonite Plastics and at Lyons. Second, my argument is that, having lived the life of a working research scientist, she had a quite different view of science from that of any other minister responsible for science. This is crucial in understanding her reaction to the proposals—associated with the Rothschild reforms of the early 1970s—to reinterpret aspects of science policy in market terms. Although she was strongly pressured by bodies such as the Royal Society to reaffirm the established place of science as a different kind of entity—one, at least at core, that was unsuitable to marketization—Thatcher took a different line.

Diamonds are forever: the cortisone legacy

The year 1946 was not only the year that the Society for Endocrinology was founded, but also the year that Edward Kendall’s compound E (cortisone) was first synthesised by Louis Sarett. By 1948, sufficient quantities of compound E were available for the rheumatologist Philip Hench to test it successfully for the first time in a patient with rheumatoid arthritis. It was immediately hailed as a ‘wonder drug’ and was shown to be effective in a number of inflammation-associated conditions, most notably rheumatoid arthritis. The subsequent development of endocrinology as a discipline is inextricably linked to the chemistry, biology and medicine of antiinflammatory glucocorticoids. Sixty years after the first chemical synthesis of cortisone, corticosteroids remain among the top ten most commonly used prescription and over the counter drugs. Basic and clinical studies of glucocorticoid biosynthesis, metabolism and action have trail-blazed developments in endocrinology ever since. This article surveys the extraordinary cortisone timeline, from first synthesis until now. The concluding scientific message is that intracrine metabolism of cortisone to cortisol via 11βhydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 1 likely sustains local amplification of glucocorticoid action at sites of inflammation throughout the body. The broader message is that the discovery of compound E by Kendall (basic scientist), its large-scale synthesis by Sarett (industrial chemist) and its therapeutic application by Hench (rheumatologist) serves as a paradigm for modern translational medicine. It is concluded that endocrinology will remain a force in health and disease if it continues to evolve sans frontières at the basic/applied/clinical science interface. A challenge for the Society for Endocrinology is to ensure this happens.