Career Stories: Navigating the Chemical Industry
From my talk with the BPS Agriculture Team
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Career Stories: BPS Agriculture
A few weeks ago I wrote an issue for this newsletter talking about phosphorous scarcity and potential solutions to feed the world by 2050. I got to talk to the R&D leadership team at BPS Agriculture for over an hour. This was my first interview for the newsletter and there was so much good stuff coming out of the interview that I realized I needed to split it up.
This issue is career focused, specifically on the journey of coming out of school and working in the industry. Through interviewing people and telling their stories here I think I am able to provide some more insight into chemistry oriented careers. One thing that I think Robert Geiger imparted to me indirectly was that it seems to be acceptable to work a bunch of a different jobs throughout your career. This is how we gain breadth of knowledge and develop unique skills.
I also ask them about advice they might give a younger version of themselves and while it might sound trite to some of the audience I think it’s actionable and useful.
This conversation made me feel better about my own career. I hope its useful to the audience. Here is the rest of my interview with David Coorts, Robert Geiger, and Dawn McKenzie of BPS Agriculture. They just launched a new product called Evofactor via their subsidiary Verano365.
Tony: How did you guys end up at BPS Agriculture and what drew you to the company in the first place?
David Coorts: I have 35 years of experience in agriculture, and I’ve held numerous roles in agriculture companies from retail co-ops to multinational companies like ICI, Dow Agrosciences, and Cargill to name a few. About 2 years ago, I was in product development with a company called Arysta Life Sciences. I had a lot of PhD mentors that took me under their wings, and we really ended up teaching each other. I would teach them how a product might look to a customer and what is important to them, and how a technical person might have to position it. They taught me the art of product development.
I was recruited away from Arysta to a startup company called New Leaf Symbiotics. I was at New Leaf for a very short time until the senior management of BPS found me and recruited me. They basically introduced me to a new technology that I felt could revolutionize agriculture. I can’t explain exactly why I decided to take the leap at that time, except that it was like a tap on the shoulder telling me I really needed to go do this.
Robert Geiger: I have a PhD in chemistry from University of Kansas, but one thing I didn’t like was I had to pick a certain area of chemistry to study. I got lucky enough with a professor who took a risk and chose a student who wanted to get trained across all areas of chemistry. Technically, my degree is in analytical chemistry, but I got my hands on pretty much every area of chemistry because I loved learning. In graduate school, I would make ligands and coordinate these to manganese centers so organic and inorganic chemistry. Then I reacted them with hydrogen peroxide to make peroxomanganese(III) complexes. The problem was they were temperature instable, and when I started the work there were probably only 2-3 known complexes to date.
So then I developed all the analytical methods to trap them and study them. Then I did all the computational chemistry to understand the electronic and geometric structure. Then, even though I told my adviser that I didn’t want to do biochemistry, we ended up relating all of my work to manganese enzymes. I was very fortunate to develop a broad skill set in graduate school and that told me off the bat that industry was probably better place for me than academia.
From graduate school I went to Oak Ridge National Lab for a postdoc and I worked more in the materials science aspect where I was doing applied learning. I developed different catalysts to convert ethanol fermentation streams to higher carbon chains such as C2 to C4 all the way to C13, and then from there fractionation to do drop-in fuels for jets.
I started my industrial career at Nalco, which isa sister company of Ecolab, and I worked in the Oil and Gas, petrochemical, and monomer production area. What was strange was they hired me knowing my background was in chemistry, but then asked me to do an engineering role on chemical monitoring and control . I did that for a few years and got to work internationally, learning about operations and sales.
I then went to a company called Compass Minerals, and I was the R&D lead for continuous improvement working on controls and then also trying to increase production and quality. Two years later, we switched gears and went into specialty agriculture. I’m from Long Island, New York, and at that point I could barely tell you what corn looked like, let alone what soybean looked like. . That’s where I fell in love with agriculture products. I had no idea how much fun agriculture is as a chemist.
At Compass, I started patenting things left and right and eventually did about ten patents in one year at Compass Minerals. I helped develope a product line called Rocket Seeds and it was voted best product by AgProfessional Magazine in 2019. A recruiter then contacted me about working for a technology holding company and told me there was a company that was going to revolutionize the agriculture space.
Tony: Final question. Any advice for the younger versions of yourselves?
David: Take every opportunity for experience that you possibly can. There is no bad experience. Take those opportunities to try something different and push yourself. Try and find really good mentors. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have someone take you under their wing and help guide you. My career has been steered throughout by people who mentored me. Find someone you want to emulate and go ask them for help because most people will say, “Yeah, I will help you.”
Robert: Especially in research, it’s ok to fail. The second advice would be, before doing any type of experiment try and determine what the outcome is and then try and decide what you are going to do if the outcome is different, and try and be 2-3 steps ahead of where you are at. So when it fails, because it absolutely will when you do it the first time, you have a few different directions to go to accelerate your projects. It’s like playing chess with chemistry and being 3-5 moves ahead of yourself.
An example of this in my career was when I was so certain of a result and someone looked at me and said, “What are you gonna do when that doesn’t happen.” I didn’t have an answer to that question, which drove me absolutely crazy, until I came up with an answer and I’ve used it ever since.
It’s a different way of thinking, but if you can get it to be where you are a few steps ahead and when you fail you are ready with a backup plan.
Dawn: As an outlier here as a journalist, what I would say to anybody who isn’t into science or math or biology and says, “I just want to write,” there is space in STEM careers for people of all different talents and skill sets and degree levels. I went to journalism school and thought that I would get my degree, work for a newspaper or go into broadcasting. Then 9/11 happened, and it was tough to get a job. I then quickly had to pivot that journalism skill set into business applications. It’s very easy to tell high school students to look at STEM careers because that is where the money is as opposed to arts-driven careers. But, there is space in STEM for people with skills in the arts. Chemical companies have podcasts and websites and they need to communicate, too.
David: One last thing. People might think Agriculture is just for farm kids, people that grew up on farms, but Agriculture is everything STEM. Agriculture is big data, it’s robotics, it’s chemistry, and there are all of these cool things that you can do outside.
Summary:
If you are going to hop around to different jobs in your career make sure there are some good examples of accomplishment that you can show your next prospective employer. If you are are in R&D then patents are quite good. There is no bad experience. I’ve had 3 jobs in the last five years and each one has taught me something valuable for the next.
Mentorship is valuable, but remember that it takes time for both parties. Ideally, your mentor will be at your place of employment, but they do not have to be. We have these things called LinkedIn, Twitter, and email. There are potential mentors out there, but you have to go to them.
If you love science, but are not a scientist there are plenty of things you can do in the space. You do not need a science degree to write a newsletter about science, to do project management, to do product management, or to work as a marketing manager. Sometimes being close to the chemistry is all you could ever need or want.
Think about research and even your career and job search as a game of chess. If your expected result comes to you then what are your next moves? If failure comes to you then what are your next moves? If your career and job was a chess match just think “What would Beth do here?”
If you want to read my other career related issues of The Polymerist I’ve listed them below:
How To Get A Job As A Chemist In The Chemical Industry:
An actionable guide on how to get a job post undergraduate or graduate school or at least this is how I did it.
You Can Only Get So Far On Your Own:
My mentors have shaped who I am as a chemist, a writer, and probably as a person.
Science and Technology Policy Fellowships:
An alternate chemistry job that might be appealing to some. I think it’s definitely important to think about public policy and how it relates to science.
Talk to you Friday,
Tony
The views here are my own and do not represent those of my employer nor should they be considered investment advice.
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