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 in 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. So I decided
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 learnt lots of new skills.
When I was studying my PhD, my research was
about making drugs for tuberculosis in greener
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 that I had.
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.
