Michael is a Laboratory Manager with CIE, a leading manufacturer of ethanol products, from beverages and fuels to cosmetic and personal care products. As a manager, Michael is responsible for data collection and ensuring his chemists have the proper setup for the necessary testing.
Transcript
My name is Michael Kelsey and I'm a laboratory manager. Well we make ethanol, so we'll make beverage-grade ethanol, we also make beauty, personal care products, a little bit of pharmaceutical-type things. We also make fuel ethanol and industrial-grade ethanol, so perfume bases and things like that. Well first and foremost, I'm kind of in charge of data collection for the company. We do train quite a bit, a few of our operators to do the tests on a day-to-day basis. So I make sure that the tests are set up correctly for them, or manage one lab tech for that. I do lab ordering, fill up our consumables, all of our test-type reagents. I do that also. Any special projects we wanna do, anything chemistry or science related, if we're developing a new project or we want to try a new chemical or enzyme, something along those lines, I'm definitely a point person on that. Well we have quite a few scientific instruments. We have a lot of chromatography instruments, gas chromatography, high-performance liquid chromatography. We have an IR, infrared, UV vis-type situation. And we'll actually put our samples in these instruments and they'll give us data back. And my job is just to make sure that the test conditions are set up correctly and that it's generating usable data. There is some travel. My company, particularly, that I'm with right now, they are very big about continuous improvement. I'd say I travel about 10% of the time. We do have a 24-7-358 day a year operation, so if something breaks at midnight or 2:00AM, I'll get up and fix that and make sure that we're always in control of our process and that we're always meeting the specification for our products.
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