Analyze This, Analyze That

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.-Lord Kelvin (Sir William Thomson)

Al Ribes draws inspiration from this famous quotation. Analytical chemists like Ribes have skills that apply to a wide range of different jobs in academics, industry, and the government. Overall job prospects have been rosier in past years, but there are a lot left to analyze. Industry? Think globally and sell within your region. Academia? Chemistry departments aren't the only ones that hire analytical chemists. And who says you have to have the same job all year?

Successful people use special skills or secondary interests to their advantage. Here are a few examples inside and outside the lab for people who adore the art of measurement.

Ribes joined Dow as an analytical bench chemist. There are certainly plenty of opportunities in industry for people to explore areas that are really outside the scope of typical analytical chemist, he says.

Ribes hails from Spain. After he joined Dow, the company had a project in Argentina, where, he explains, they needed a generalist who could handle all sorts of analytical methods and who was bilingual. He says it was an unusual opportunity, and I just happened to be in the right place at the right time and have the right skills.

Upon returning to the U.S., he became certified as a Black Belt in Dow's Six Sigma program, an efficiency methodology started at General Electric. Ribes's projects included optimizing the additive system in one plant and the human component at another, improving how products get to customers, and data mining to improve purchasing processes. Now he coordinates analytical services for one business unit.

Ribes thinks analytical chemistry jobs in large companies are depressed. He sees opportunities with upcoming retirement waves and in small companies. Right now, recruiting is at replacement level due to attrition from retirement or employment mismatch. And those jobs are mostly filled by Ph.D.s.

He says process analytical, chemometrics, and automation for high-throughput analysis still interest industry, as well as separations, spectroscopy, microscopy, and surface analysis.

There has always been an element of outsource for analytical work, he says. Sometimes we will send some high-volume, more-routine-level work to contract labs, but internal people familiar with the product line are needed to interpret the data. For some complex work, he says, the external technology department of Dow tries to collaborate with universities and national labs, because we are cognizant of their wealth of expertise.

For example, the National Institute of Standards & Technology studies fires. Analytical chemists who are also familiar with materials science quantify the smoke produced and what gases or organic compounds compose that smoke, explains William Grosshandler, chief of the Fire Research Division at NIST. Although NIST's staff members do not develop products, they help commercial companies understand what happens to a product during combustion. NIST employs many analytical chemists at all levels in various projects including homeland security and standards work.

When the needs of an industry or government analytical lab change, contract workers often fill the voids.

Most of Kelly Scientific Resources' placements are actually in the pharmaceutical sectors due to the emphasis on Food & Drug Administration audits and drug validation studies, says Richard Pennock, northeast regional manager for the firm, the scientific staffing arm of Kelly Services. Although Kelly places applicants in some R&D jobs, he says most analytical chemists fill quality assurance/quality control spots in pharmaceutical, chemical, and food technology companies. Within the government, he sees a lot of opportunities for analytical chemists at the National Institutes of Health and to support the National Nanotechnology Initiative.

Increasingly, scientists choose to pursue contracts. We see more and more of what Kelly has and what we call free agents-scientists who are looking for that type of project-oriented work environment, Pennock says. Roughly one-third of their contractors fall into this category. They like to contribute to a particular project, and they gain satisfaction by completing that project and are always looking for the next one, he says.

Pay rates are attractive-the highest paid contract scientist placed by Kelly makes more than $200,000 annually. Kelly offers many of the same benefits of a traditional employer, including vacation and holiday pay, opportunities for health insurance, a 401(k) retirement plan, and referral bonuses. He adds that the majority of analytical chemists Kelly deals with who are looking for permanent jobs are coming right out of college.

Analytical chemistry has changed over the years and is probably one of the most viable subdisciplines of chemistry right now, says Isiah M. Warner, a professor of analytical chemistry at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.

When things go up, people say, Oh, analytical chemistry is great.' When they go down, people say, Oh, we better get rid of all the analytical chemists,' but I don't think we should react to that, Warner says. There are schools that are beginning to add on analytical chemistry. He uses his own university as an example of growth. When he arrived in 1992, there were three analytical chemists; now, there are seven.

Big universities are not the only options, he says. Smaller universities are very important because they need people to teach the analytical component.

There are also opportunities in academia beyond the chemistry department. Instrument facilities at universities also need B.S. and Ph.D. analytical chemists, Warner adds. For example, he says, mass spectroscopy facilities service chemistry but could work with biological and environmental science departments. People who sequence peptides can also work across departments.

Or they may be professors. I'm in a very nontraditional place for an analytical chemist, says John R. Yates, a professor at Scripps Research Institute and an associate editor for the journal Analytical Chemistry. His research includes mass spectrometry and proteomics. I'm actually in a cell biology department.

I think most of the exciting work that's going on in analytical chemistry is going on in the fringes, so people are taking the techniques and philosophies of analytical chemistry but working in more biological areas, Yates says.

Why go nontraditional? Funding is one answer. If you listen to places like NIH and so forth, they claim that the innovative research-and the stuff that they are most interested in-is happening at the boundary of disciplines, Yates says.

Yates looks for staff who are good scientists. His team includes an analytical chemist, a computational biologist, geneticists, cell biologists, and molecular biologists. I have a wide variety of people, and that just adds to the richness of the lab.

For those looking to get on the road, consider analytical instrument sales. As a doctoral student in lipid biochemistry, Steven Royce used lots of analytical instrumentation. Most people were treating the instruments kind of as black boxes-stick a sample in and get an answer out, he says. I was always the person who was taking them apart and working on them. Shortly after defending his dissertation, he went to work at a part of Hewlett-Packard that was spun off as Agilent.

He says, You can't be in sales unless you are able to take rejection, and so you have to have a certain constitution to be able to manage the highs and the lows.

In his 22 years at Agilent, he has held various positions but has shied away from management because he likes the front lines. Now a mass spectrometry specialist covering New England and New York, he enjoys interfacing with scientists in many different kinds of labs-academic labs in the Boston area and in New York City and biotech and pharmaceutical companies as far as Rochester, N.Y. He also works with state police crime labs and health departments as well as the chemical industry. Fifty percent of his time is spent traveling.

Royce works with salary at risk. For example, he explains a typical plan might be 60/40, where 60% is doled out as a salary, and then you make up the 40% through your sales.

Business varies with what is hot at the time, he says. With increased funding for homeland security, he says there's been investment in liquid and gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. Academic grants are primarily dependent on federal funding from the National Science Foundation and NIH. When those funds are low, academics put off buying equipment.

Sales jobs are available. Although he has a Ph.D., Royce says most analytical instrument sales reps are B.S. chemists with lab instrument experience. Agilent does recognize years in industry as the equivalent to graduate work.