Melissa is a Senior Formulation Chemist with Dow AgroSciences LLC. Based out of Indianapolis, Melissa and her team develop and test new agricultural products. She has to constantly balance the demands of the consumer within the hard parameters of scientific possibilities. Find out how many different academic paths may lead to formulation chemistry!
Transcript
Melissa: My name is Melissa Olds and I work at Dow Agrisciences as a formulation chemist. What that basically is is a chemist who uses a variety of different sciences whether they be analytical sciences, organic chemistry, to do product development and in this case it's agriculture products. One of the interesting things about my role is you have to have an understanding of science and basic principles of science but also business as well because it's a product that's ultimately going to be sold in the market place. Understanding what product you're going to be developing and its uses in the market, how somebody wants to use it, or their desired attributes, is very important because you want to incorporate those into your design. Then you will create experiments around that to get to your end goal and ultimately the commercial product that will be sold on the shelf and customers will purchase. That product needs to both have the attributes that your customer is desiring but also it needs to have the scientific backing behind it, both chemically and physically stable. You don't want any interactions going on between the different components that make up that product. For example if you purchase a personal care product on the shelf you don't necessarily want it to turn your hair purple when you wash your hair so we will do different experiments in the lab, testing it under different conditions whether it's going to be used in a cold temperatures of North Dakota or the warm temperatures of Central America. We want to make sure that it's going to withstand all of those. So there's a couple different products that I've worked on globally. One of them recently launched within the last few years here in the U.S. It's used on soybeans, Surveil Herbicide, you can look that up on YouTube, and it has a unique attribute that we looked for and how it handles once it's added to water which was an attribute the customers were looking for. You can look at that video and see how that particular product behaves in water compared to other products in the marketplace.
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