With increasing pressure to supplement funding with commercialization, university laboratories are often required to engage in paid consultancy work. These laboratories are not always geared towards customer focused high throughput testing. In this regard there are lessons to be learnt from the commercial sphere.
Jack will discuss his experiences in a government and commercial environmental residues laboratory, as well as a commercial pathology laboratory. As well as discussing the ideas of maximizing throughput and efficiency, he will explain some of the more ‘research’ tasks he has undertaken over the past 7 years. These have included client requested method development, assessment of a ‘new’ timber preservative and its breakdown in the environment and characterizing proprietary ingredients in technical formulations to set up ongoing environmental monitoring.
Jack graduated from Griffith University in 2006 with a BSc majoring in Pollution and Health. In 2007, he obtained a first class honors from Griffith University with his project calibrating passive air samplers for sampling PAHs from ambient air. Following this, his PhD was completed at the University of Queensland in 2012 focusing on measurement of per- and poly- fluoroalkyl substances in the Australian environment. Since then he has spent time in both government and commercial laboratories, refining his analytical skills and applying them to a widespread range of matrices and analytes; from illicit drugs in urine, to pesticides in environmental waters, to industrial chemicals in soils. He continues to enjoy the challenges of analytical chemistry and method development and is always seeking new opportunities for learning, and new areas to apply his knowledge.