The purpose of this post is primarily to get the audience to talk to each other and not necessarily to me directly. The economy might be starting the “landing” and if it’s soft or hard is yet to be determined. This newsletter audience is big enough that I’m sure there are both people looking for jobs as well as hiring.
One thing is clear is that you are all very bright and are looking for something that isn’t being provided out there. Please introduce yourselves in the comments and help each other out if possible.
👋 James here from Macro Oceans — we're using seaweed as a low carbon polymer platform. We've got a product line focused on speciality chemicals (e.g., polysaccharides for cosmetics) and then another focused on more commodity polymers. We're based in Sacramento, CA and would love to chat.
I'm Conor and I primarily work in plastic packaging. I'm also serving as President of SPE this year. Furthermore, I'm advising a start-up spun out of MIT that is currently seeking an MSC or PhD in chemistry, chemical engineering, or materials science with 3-5 years experience with experimental chemistry and >2 years with polymer synthesis. They are working on a new recycling process for PET. LMK if anyone is interested to learn more.
I heard about The Polymerist through my colleagues at Citrine Informatics, where the latest post is a frequent conversation starter! Citrine Informatics provides an AI platform focussed on R&D in the chemicals and materials industries. For me, it has been an amazing experience to straddle the worlds of chemistry and software, and I've had a blast working with scientists across the globe on really diverse products.
If I can help anyone considering a similar career, or in navigating the intersection of chemistry and AI, please reach out!
Hi, I am Pushpendre, I work in Google Deepmind on text diffusion models, which are slightly related to the models used in AlphaFold. I graduated from Johns Hopkins with a Ph.d in machine learning.
I got interested in Synthetic Biology around the time of covid and I think I started following this blog at that time, as I wondered what working with atoms instead of bits might actually be like.
I dont have any practical chemistry experience, in fact chemistry was probably my weakest subject because of the need to memorize reactions which had more exceptions than patterns, but I do feel that this area is really important and cool.
Hello Polymeristas! Such a great newsletter, yea?? My company is a chemical company that focuses on waterbased silicone products; coatings, co-binders, additives, etc. Bit of a mix between a paint company and silicone polymer synthesizer. We cover some really cool industries; glass coatings for hi-rise buildings, auto wind screen obscuration bands, silicone waterbased elastomer co-binders for organic systems, anti-graffiti coatings, air and weather barrier coatings, roof coatings. We focus where waterbased and silicone make a better sustainable solutions than what is currently on the market.
We are always looking for bright, driven chemists with silicone experience! Even without silicone experience! Around here we do things the hard way, we create high performance products, nothing commodity.
Short/medium term goals are more sustainable products with greater value to replace commodity products in the industries we serve. Long-term vision is solving all the things with great innovative and clean chemistry. We have had projects in designing new tin catalysts for less ocean bio harm to long held dreams of flux capacitors that turn household garbage back into oil. We all gotta have dreams.
Always quick to help people network, feel free to connect, Polymeristas!
I have been following Tony Maiorana for some time on his Polymerist. As a polymer chemist specializing in the field of stabilization and controlled degradation and synthesis of high Mw Macromolecules I have seen many changes in the last 45 years in this field. In my opinion the changes in the global field by those in manufacturing have created the problems we have experienced today. Reduction in fortification and decrease in life cycles is not the sustainability. Chemical depolymerization has reached a dead end but still promoted as the solution when the truth be told it has a higher carbon footprint. Mechanical recycling continues to be a dominant force in the market and with the discovery of molecular imprint and recognition technology life cycle resolution to recycling, upcycling and supracycling has come into play. Those in the chemical industry has missed the boat on the tech. that truly makes the difference and its was not until I left corporate america that I started to see the light and make a difference.
My name is Stephen. I was lab mates with Tony at NYU and later RPI, and have been following the newsletter since it began.
My doctoral studies were in materials and polymer science. About three years ago, I transitioned to data science, using Python and SQL to configure Electronic Lab Notebooks.
I was recently laid off due to corporate restructuring, and am currently looking for a role in the data engineering, data science, chem-informatics or related fields.
I’m Nihat, polymer materials engineer, worked in the rubber industry for 10 years in compounding and polymer development at a large tire company in Europe and US. About 3 years ago, I switched over to plastics working for a large consumer electronics OEM, super passionate about enabling the transition to recycled/renewable plastics. I’d love to hear from you all what you think is going to accelerate the transition.
I'm Larry, Ph.D in physical organic chemistry from UC Santa Barbara 1986. I'm an organic chemist in the industry for 35 years, mostly process R&D and scaleup. My current position is at Actylis Buffalo where we work on scaling up processes to our kilo labs, pilot plant and beyond in all areas of chemistry (including some polymer chemistry, I know enough in this area to be dangerous!). All of the work is contract R&D, we have had clients ranging from small startups to most all major chemical manufacturers domestic and world-wide.
I'm a former MSE student who switched to Mechanical and minored in MSE instead. I still maintain my materials engineering fascination which began when I was in grade school, but I now work in the Pacific Northwest forest products industry. In the ~2 years since I graduated I have worked on corporate capital projects, automation, and lignocellulosic R&D, but I recently transferred to take over as site engineer for one of the company's lumber mills.
Lignocellulosic chemistry has a lot of room to expand, and a lot of pent up demand. The sooner we can start fixing the microplastics and plasticizer leaching problems, the better off we'll be.
Hi everyone - Keeton Ross here, I help run a direct air capture (DAC) start-up based in Knoxville, TN. Our facilities look and feel a lot like traditional chemical plants, which is what started me down the road of meeting Tony. We're always eager to meet more folks who are either based near us, or willing to check out Eastern TN and bring skills + experience from the traditional petrochemical industries.
I'm at keeton@theholocene.co, and we're Holocene (www.theholocene.co) if you wanna check us out! And I've been involved with a number of start-ups from the operator + investor side, so shoot me a line if I can ever help out.
Hi! I'm a PhD student in Materials Engineering, @OsmiumTextroxide sent one of Tony's articles to me and I've really appreciated reading about industry paths, since most of my mentors have spent their whole lives in academia. I'm working on additive manufacturing, with projects that touch on ultrasound/sonochemistry, cellulose derivatives, and hydrogels. 2-3 years out from graduation (who knows what the economy will look like then) but hoping to work in sustainable polymers. Always interested in startups doing recycling or petroleum alternatives.
I personally just left a sales management position that they will have to recruit for if anyone is looking. I left because a few old coworkers had me in mind and reached out for an open position.
The role I left is focused on FEVE fluoropolymers. The PFAS discussion is a challenge I am not interested in solving as a young professional.
The market was soft when I left. Construction is strong in certain sectors but not office buildings.
I am Vish. I write about why I'm so mad about the education system and conjure up ways it's due for a significant shift with the hopes to start a conversation!
I am Berkay, former R&D Chemist, recently technical sales. Working in a chemical producing company mostly serving to wood based panel industry. I am here to share my sectoral insights.
I'm a coatings chemist who formulates sustainable aqueous coating products for food packaging.
My team is working to make inroads on single-use plastics and PFAS-embedded wrapping paper. Unfortunately, I am scheduled to be downsized by the end of May. I live in Massachusetts and am looking for a similar role in sectors such as defense, construction, and pharma.
Kudos to Tony for getting this started. It's nice to know the regular readers.
I'm Charlie, and I'm currently a Chemical Engineering student at Lehigh University, and I found The Polymerist through my dad, who is always on the lookout for interesting articles and journals to send me.
This last summer I worked at a small startup called Powered Armor Technology, or PAT for short. We've been developing a technique for creating mechanically strong activated carbon for use in supercapacitor electrodes. The end goal is to create capacitors that can function as both power storage and structural members, and be produced relatively cheaply and safely at scale. One great use case I always give as an example is solar panels - instead of using aluminum or steel mounting brackets to put panels on your house and having power storage elsewhere, the mounting brackets themselves could store the power you generate.
When I was there last summer, we were still looking into how we can manipulate the fabrication to consistently control qualities like pore size, strength, and surface area. I spent a couple weeks building a bench scale reactor so we could quickly create small samples and cells for analysis. I got some great experience designing gas systems, including scrubbers for corrosive gasses, and I learned quite a bit about using programmable logic controllers for furnace control. Best of all, I got to do most of it relatively independently, and it was amazing to design, order parts, and put together a full, working reactor. I must say I was incredibly relieved after the first samples came out as expected, and the reactor has continued to run well since then.
Even though it was a wonderful experience, I'm looking for something different this summer, but so far haven't gotten any luck. If anyone has opportunities or just wants to chat more about supercapacitors, please let met know!
Hi folks, I don't remember how I heard about The Polymerist. My Ph.D. is in Ethnopoetics and I'm working on topic modeling/LLMs in 16th-17th Century English and Nahuatl. I don't know much about chemistry or polymers or plastics. But this is such a great read every single time.
I had the good fortune of meeting Tony a few years ago while working for the Green Chemistry Institute at ACS. I am now applying my background in chemistry and sustainability to forward-looking impact assessments of new ventures as Principal Scientist at Rho Impact. My work focuses on methodology design and and data prototyping for emissions reduction tools and databases. I love sitting at the interface of life cycle analysis, clean tech, and data science. Coming from an academic research background, it has been eye opening seeing the gap between sustainability research and the information investors and operators need at hand to make greener decisions. It is an exciting time to be in this quickly developing space. If any of you will be at SF Climate Week in April, let me know. We will be launching two software products there. Always looking to learn more and meet others! Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/auroraginzburg/
I'm Ethan, a Ph.D. candidate in Systems, Synthetic and Quantitative Biology, at Harvard University. My work focuses on protein engineering, synthetic biological approaches to rare earth element refinement, and sustainability focused microbiology. I'm not a polymer chemist (in the slightest), but I am defending this May, so feel free to give a shout if anyone you know is looking for someone more towards the enzymes, proteins and cells side.
👋 James here from Macro Oceans — we're using seaweed as a low carbon polymer platform. We've got a product line focused on speciality chemicals (e.g., polysaccharides for cosmetics) and then another focused on more commodity polymers. We're based in Sacramento, CA and would love to chat.
Nice initiative, Tony.
I'm Conor and I primarily work in plastic packaging. I'm also serving as President of SPE this year. Furthermore, I'm advising a start-up spun out of MIT that is currently seeking an MSC or PhD in chemistry, chemical engineering, or materials science with 3-5 years experience with experimental chemistry and >2 years with polymer synthesis. They are working on a new recycling process for PET. LMK if anyone is interested to learn more.
Hi Everyone,
I heard about The Polymerist through my colleagues at Citrine Informatics, where the latest post is a frequent conversation starter! Citrine Informatics provides an AI platform focussed on R&D in the chemicals and materials industries. For me, it has been an amazing experience to straddle the worlds of chemistry and software, and I've had a blast working with scientists across the globe on really diverse products.
If I can help anyone considering a similar career, or in navigating the intersection of chemistry and AI, please reach out!
Hi, I am Pushpendre, I work in Google Deepmind on text diffusion models, which are slightly related to the models used in AlphaFold. I graduated from Johns Hopkins with a Ph.d in machine learning.
I got interested in Synthetic Biology around the time of covid and I think I started following this blog at that time, as I wondered what working with atoms instead of bits might actually be like.
I dont have any practical chemistry experience, in fact chemistry was probably my weakest subject because of the need to memorize reactions which had more exceptions than patterns, but I do feel that this area is really important and cool.
Hello Polymeristas! Such a great newsletter, yea?? My company is a chemical company that focuses on waterbased silicone products; coatings, co-binders, additives, etc. Bit of a mix between a paint company and silicone polymer synthesizer. We cover some really cool industries; glass coatings for hi-rise buildings, auto wind screen obscuration bands, silicone waterbased elastomer co-binders for organic systems, anti-graffiti coatings, air and weather barrier coatings, roof coatings. We focus where waterbased and silicone make a better sustainable solutions than what is currently on the market.
We are always looking for bright, driven chemists with silicone experience! Even without silicone experience! Around here we do things the hard way, we create high performance products, nothing commodity.
Short/medium term goals are more sustainable products with greater value to replace commodity products in the industries we serve. Long-term vision is solving all the things with great innovative and clean chemistry. We have had projects in designing new tin catalysts for less ocean bio harm to long held dreams of flux capacitors that turn household garbage back into oil. We all gotta have dreams.
Always quick to help people network, feel free to connect, Polymeristas!
www.icdcoatings.com & kris.vockler@icdcoatings.com
Best, Kris
I have been following Tony Maiorana for some time on his Polymerist. As a polymer chemist specializing in the field of stabilization and controlled degradation and synthesis of high Mw Macromolecules I have seen many changes in the last 45 years in this field. In my opinion the changes in the global field by those in manufacturing have created the problems we have experienced today. Reduction in fortification and decrease in life cycles is not the sustainability. Chemical depolymerization has reached a dead end but still promoted as the solution when the truth be told it has a higher carbon footprint. Mechanical recycling continues to be a dominant force in the market and with the discovery of molecular imprint and recognition technology life cycle resolution to recycling, upcycling and supracycling has come into play. Those in the chemical industry has missed the boat on the tech. that truly makes the difference and its was not until I left corporate america that I started to see the light and make a difference.
Hello Everyone,
My name is Stephen. I was lab mates with Tony at NYU and later RPI, and have been following the newsletter since it began.
My doctoral studies were in materials and polymer science. About three years ago, I transitioned to data science, using Python and SQL to configure Electronic Lab Notebooks.
I was recently laid off due to corporate restructuring, and am currently looking for a role in the data engineering, data science, chem-informatics or related fields.
Nice to meet everyone.
Hello Everyone,
I’m Nihat, polymer materials engineer, worked in the rubber industry for 10 years in compounding and polymer development at a large tire company in Europe and US. About 3 years ago, I switched over to plastics working for a large consumer electronics OEM, super passionate about enabling the transition to recycled/renewable plastics. I’d love to hear from you all what you think is going to accelerate the transition.
I'm Larry, Ph.D in physical organic chemistry from UC Santa Barbara 1986. I'm an organic chemist in the industry for 35 years, mostly process R&D and scaleup. My current position is at Actylis Buffalo where we work on scaling up processes to our kilo labs, pilot plant and beyond in all areas of chemistry (including some polymer chemistry, I know enough in this area to be dangerous!). All of the work is contract R&D, we have had clients ranging from small startups to most all major chemical manufacturers domestic and world-wide.
Howdy Polymerists,
I'm a former MSE student who switched to Mechanical and minored in MSE instead. I still maintain my materials engineering fascination which began when I was in grade school, but I now work in the Pacific Northwest forest products industry. In the ~2 years since I graduated I have worked on corporate capital projects, automation, and lignocellulosic R&D, but I recently transferred to take over as site engineer for one of the company's lumber mills.
Lignocellulosic chemistry has a lot of room to expand, and a lot of pent up demand. The sooner we can start fixing the microplastics and plasticizer leaching problems, the better off we'll be.
Hi everyone - Keeton Ross here, I help run a direct air capture (DAC) start-up based in Knoxville, TN. Our facilities look and feel a lot like traditional chemical plants, which is what started me down the road of meeting Tony. We're always eager to meet more folks who are either based near us, or willing to check out Eastern TN and bring skills + experience from the traditional petrochemical industries.
I'm at keeton@theholocene.co, and we're Holocene (www.theholocene.co) if you wanna check us out! And I've been involved with a number of start-ups from the operator + investor side, so shoot me a line if I can ever help out.
Hi! I'm a PhD student in Materials Engineering, @OsmiumTextroxide sent one of Tony's articles to me and I've really appreciated reading about industry paths, since most of my mentors have spent their whole lives in academia. I'm working on additive manufacturing, with projects that touch on ultrasound/sonochemistry, cellulose derivatives, and hydrogels. 2-3 years out from graduation (who knows what the economy will look like then) but hoping to work in sustainable polymers. Always interested in startups doing recycling or petroleum alternatives.
I personally just left a sales management position that they will have to recruit for if anyone is looking. I left because a few old coworkers had me in mind and reached out for an open position.
The role I left is focused on FEVE fluoropolymers. The PFAS discussion is a challenge I am not interested in solving as a young professional.
The market was soft when I left. Construction is strong in certain sectors but not office buildings.
Hi Tony and everyone,
I am Vish. I write about why I'm so mad about the education system and conjure up ways it's due for a significant shift with the hopes to start a conversation!
Dear Tony and All,
I am Berkay, former R&D Chemist, recently technical sales. Working in a chemical producing company mostly serving to wood based panel industry. I am here to share my sectoral insights.
Hi everyone,
I'm a coatings chemist who formulates sustainable aqueous coating products for food packaging.
My team is working to make inroads on single-use plastics and PFAS-embedded wrapping paper. Unfortunately, I am scheduled to be downsized by the end of May. I live in Massachusetts and am looking for a similar role in sectors such as defense, construction, and pharma.
Kudos to Tony for getting this started. It's nice to know the regular readers.
Hello everyone,
I'm Charlie, and I'm currently a Chemical Engineering student at Lehigh University, and I found The Polymerist through my dad, who is always on the lookout for interesting articles and journals to send me.
This last summer I worked at a small startup called Powered Armor Technology, or PAT for short. We've been developing a technique for creating mechanically strong activated carbon for use in supercapacitor electrodes. The end goal is to create capacitors that can function as both power storage and structural members, and be produced relatively cheaply and safely at scale. One great use case I always give as an example is solar panels - instead of using aluminum or steel mounting brackets to put panels on your house and having power storage elsewhere, the mounting brackets themselves could store the power you generate.
When I was there last summer, we were still looking into how we can manipulate the fabrication to consistently control qualities like pore size, strength, and surface area. I spent a couple weeks building a bench scale reactor so we could quickly create small samples and cells for analysis. I got some great experience designing gas systems, including scrubbers for corrosive gasses, and I learned quite a bit about using programmable logic controllers for furnace control. Best of all, I got to do most of it relatively independently, and it was amazing to design, order parts, and put together a full, working reactor. I must say I was incredibly relieved after the first samples came out as expected, and the reactor has continued to run well since then.
Even though it was a wonderful experience, I'm looking for something different this summer, but so far haven't gotten any luck. If anyone has opportunities or just wants to chat more about supercapacitors, please let met know!
Hi folks, I don't remember how I heard about The Polymerist. My Ph.D. is in Ethnopoetics and I'm working on topic modeling/LLMs in 16th-17th Century English and Nahuatl. I don't know much about chemistry or polymers or plastics. But this is such a great read every single time.
Hi guys I’m Hector and I’m 18 looking to study chemistry at an undergraduate level, any advice?
Hi all —
I had the good fortune of meeting Tony a few years ago while working for the Green Chemistry Institute at ACS. I am now applying my background in chemistry and sustainability to forward-looking impact assessments of new ventures as Principal Scientist at Rho Impact. My work focuses on methodology design and and data prototyping for emissions reduction tools and databases. I love sitting at the interface of life cycle analysis, clean tech, and data science. Coming from an academic research background, it has been eye opening seeing the gap between sustainability research and the information investors and operators need at hand to make greener decisions. It is an exciting time to be in this quickly developing space. If any of you will be at SF Climate Week in April, let me know. We will be launching two software products there. Always looking to learn more and meet others! Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/auroraginzburg/
Cheers,
Aurora
Hi Everyone,
I'm Ethan, a Ph.D. candidate in Systems, Synthetic and Quantitative Biology, at Harvard University. My work focuses on protein engineering, synthetic biological approaches to rare earth element refinement, and sustainability focused microbiology. I'm not a polymer chemist (in the slightest), but I am defending this May, so feel free to give a shout if anyone you know is looking for someone more towards the enzymes, proteins and cells side.