Chemistry careers - A day in the work life of a chemist

Hello my name is Hilary. I'm a process development chemist at Glycosyn which is a part of Callaghan Innovation. At Glycosyn we get contract work from pharmaceutical companies to make new drugs for clinical trials. This involves working with a variety of different people including small scale research scientists from universities. What I do as a process development chemist is work on the scale up part of that process. So this is learning how to make a molecule on a small scale such as milligrams in a lab setting and then scaling that process up to make it on larger and larger quantities eventually up to a kilogram sort of scale in the pilot plant. Some of the challenges involved in scale up chemistry relate to the fact that as you scale things up processes such as mixing and heating change at a larger scale. You can think of this like when you're baking a cake. When you double the size of the mixture then you have to mix it even better to make sure that all the ingredients are combined appropriately and you don't simply double the time that you heat it for because it also depends on how good your oven is and the size of the cake tins that you're using. I've always been interested in chemistry and science and how things work and so I decided that that was what I wanted to do as a career after studying a bachelor's degree in chemistry and maths. It was the chemistry that really appealed to me because of the real life applications and the potential to really help people and make a difference in the world. I got my first chemistry job after I did my honours. I decided that I needed a break from study and wanted to get some more real lab experience and real life experience. I worked as an analytical chemistry technician for a year which I really enjoyed and in that time I learned lots of new skills. When I was studying my PhD my research was about making drugs for tuberculosis in green and more environmentally friendly ways. One of the cool things that I discovered while doing this was in the process of making a whole library series of molecules. I discovered some that were really good at killing the bacteria that causes tuberculosis so this was a really exciting finding. Some of the coolest things about being a chemist for me is that I get to spend a lot of time doing things with my hands and working in the lab doing purifications and reactions. I also find the problem solving aspect of the job really satisfying. You don't always get successful experiments so to be able to be a great scientist you need to have perseverance and persistence to continue on with a project that may be quite challenging.