Analytical chemistry

im having so hard time in this subject right now and feel like crying. I am first year college MLS student and really not that good at quantitative chemistry so I am not quite confident whenever I am in this class. How do you manage to be good in analytical chemistry if you are not that good in solving equations?

Hello, Redditors! My name is Lee Polite. I am the president and founder of Axion Analytical Labs, Inc. and Axion Training Institute. My background is chromatography. I received my Ph.D. in chromatography (chemistry) from Virginia Tech, under the direction of Professor Harold McNair (world’s greatest guy and one of the fathers of modern HPLC and GC!). While in graduate school, I spent my time studying HPLC, GC, IC, SFC and CE. After a quick postdoc at Virginia Tech finishing up a cool project developing bomb detectors, I took a job as a research scientist with Amoco Corporation (now known as British Petroleum or BP).

I spent 9 years with Amoco, applying and honing my chromatography skills on projects for the various Amoco subsidiaries, including installing GC methods at refineries, developing HPLC methods for whacky organic chemists, consulting for the laser and biotechnology companies, running the environmental analysis group, and serving as the supervisor for a large refinery lab. After 9 fun years with Amoco, I left and started Axion Labs. Axion is a real hands-on chromatography laboratory, but our major purpose is to develop and teach hands-on HPLC and GC courses to professionals. Over the years I’ve taught some 8000 scientists from every major pharmaceutical, chemical and petroleum company in the US, along with most of the major US government labs (DEA, FDA, EPA, DOD, DOE, etc.). I’ve also had the pleasure of teaching chromatography in 17 different countries. I have also written three book chapters and over one hundred course manuals on HPLC and GC. Axion is the sole provider of hands-on HPLC and GC training courses for the American Chemical Society.

My research interests include fast HPLC and fast GC. To me, that means taking existing methods, and making them much faster (2-20X) while still providing good resolution between peaks. For example, in our hands-on training courses, we end the week with a method development project. The participants (many of them were beginners when the course started) are given an unknown in a vial, and are expected to come up with a working HPLC or GC method. The next step is to see how fast they can do the separation. These are samples that the industry would consider to be 15-20 minute runs. Every one of the participants will come up with an excellent method from scratch, that accomplishes the separation in less than a minute! The trick to all of this is understanding the fundamentals of chromatography.

We specialize in teaching these chromatography fundamentals in a unique and understandable way, using analogies (transferable concepts). For example, everyone finds it easy to drive a car. We know what pedal to push to make it go faster, which pedal slows us down, and which device changes the direction of travel. Using that knowledge, we can teach someone how to “drive” an HPLC or GC. We teach what “button” to press to make the analysis go faster, what “knob” to turn to get better resolution, and what parameters to look at when the separation is not good. The great thing is that the participants don’t simply memorize things, but truly understand how chromatography works. So please, ask me anything to do with chromatography (HPLC, GC, IC, etc.), and I hope to come up with a good explanation…and have a little fun along the way! I’ll be back at 2:00 PM EDT to answer your questions!

EDIT 2:10 PM I am online and answering questions!

EDIT 3:12 PM: Thank you for participating in the AMA! As a thank you we’d like to extend a discount to you for my courses at Axion Labs , , and [ Practical and Applied Gas Chromatography] () (a 2-day course in Texas) offered through the American Chemical Society. Register between now and April 22, 2016 using the code ACSREDDIT20OFF to receive 20% off of your registration fee.

EDIT 3:42 PM: I'm officially signing off! Thanks for a fun afternoon with lots of wonderful chromatography inquiries. I wish I could have gotten to all of them, and I plan to revisit this page in the coming week to attempt to do just that. If you would like to join our mailing list for updates on course dates and online content OR if you've got burning chromatography questions that aren't going to answer themselves, please go to the at AxionLabs.com.

EDIT 4/14 6:34 PM: Lee had such a great time answering questions with the Reddit community, he decided to become a part of it! Look for more responses here and continued interaction with him from . Lee would love to field chromatography questions any time.

Hi there,

I posted a few weeks ago about being offered a job at Novo Nordisk as a manufacturing technician. I decided to turn it down because it didn't seem relevant enough to the skills I wanted to build. I was offered the job as a laboratory analyst at a small lab, where I would be doing wet chem, GCMS, LCMS, ICPMS-MS, HPLC, etc. I didn't have any research experience other than lab classes in college, so I'm really hoping to round out my technical skills as a fresh grad.

I'm wondering what to expect and if it sounds like a good stepping stone. I think I'd ultimately like to go back to school for a Master's to work in medchem or biotechnology, but I'm open to getting experience and finding a niche elsewhere too. The job has good hours, paid holidays and pays 42k salaried.

Thanks for reading!

Does anyone work as lab technician in analytical chemistry role? If so, what kind of company do you work for? And what kind of salary do you make?

Im currently studying in analytical chemistry and just want to know what kind of company to look for to get a better salary and if there’s any kind of extra skills that I can get while I’m still in school that would help me get better jobs in chemistry lab technician.

Hello friends! 💚

If you've seen our , you'll know that there's some question as to how much lithium is in modern food. This question is worth considering because lithium contamination is on the rise, and if there were enough lithium in your food, it would present a health risk, because lithium is psychoactive and has lots of weird side-effects.

The literature is pretty confused. Some sources report very low levels (< 0.1 mg/kg) and others report higher levels (sometimes > 10 mg/kg). It's not just that they're looking at different foods — this seems like a real contradiction, at least to us.

Our read of the literature made us think that the different results were caused by different analytic techniques. Studies that use HNO3 digestion with ICP-MS tend to find no more than trace levels of lithium in their food samples. But studies that use other analysis techniques like ICP-OES or AAS, and/or use different acids like H2SO4 or HCl for their digestion, often find more than 1 mg/kg in various foods.

To test this, we ran a head-to-head study where we put 10 foods through a matrix of analyses: two analysis techniques (ICP-MS and ICP-OES) and three methods of digestion (nitric acid, hydrochloric acid, and dry ashing), fully crossed, for a total of six conditions. Sadly, hydrochloric acid digestion visibly failed to digest 6 of the 10 foods, so this was the final design:

Little difference was found between the results given by ICP-MS and ICP-OES, other than the fact that (as expected) ICP-MS is more sensitive to detecting low levels of lithium. However, a large difference was found between the results given by HNO3 digestion and dry ashing.

In samples digested in HNO3, both ICP-MS and ICP-OES analysis mostly reported that concentrations of lithium were below the limit of detection.

In comparison, all dry ashed samples, analyzed by both ICP-MS and ICP-OES, were found to contain levels of lithium above the limit of detection. Some of these levels were quite low — for example, carrots were found to contain only about 0.1-0.5 mg/kg lithium. But other levels were found to be relatively high. The four foods with the highest concentrations of lithium, at least per these analysis methods, were ground beef (up to 5.8 mg/kg lithium), corn syrup (up to 8.1 mg/kg lithium), goji berries (up to 14.8 mg/kg lithium), and eggs (up to 15.8 mg/kg lithium). 

Here are the results in figure form:

We think the dry ashing results are probably more accurate, but overall we're not sure what to make of the outcome. If you know anything about analytical chemistry, or know someone who does, we would love your help 1) interpreting these results and 2) figuring out what to do next, in particular figuring out a way to nail down which of these techniques is more accurate, or finding a third technique more accurate than both.

Some of you might be chemists. If you have access to the necessary equipment, we would really appreciate if you would be willing to replicate our work. Independent labs should confirm that they get similar results when comparing HNO3 digestion to dry ashing in ICP-MS and ICP-OES analysis. 

An even bigger favor would be to extend our work. If you are able to replicate the basic finding, it would be jolly good to tack on some new foods or try some new analytical techniques. Do you have access to AAS for some reason? Wonderful, please throw an egg into the flame for us. 

Much more detail can be found in . Thank you for reading! :D

Has anyone successfully made a career transfer from clinical chemistry into analytical chemistry without any further schooling? I currently work with GC/MS and LC/MS and would like to take this experience out of the medical field, but seem to be of no interest to potential employers. Any advice?

The knowledge and experience is mine, and it’s something no one can ever take from me.

Hello! I graduated with my PhD in chemistry this past year and found a job (entry level industry position) after about 6 months and 300 applications. The future isn't clear for me at the moment, and I may consider a big move within a year, so I'm hoping to fix up my resume for applying to other industry positions, government jobs, teaching positions, post docs, and just anything in general. I really don't know what I want to do in the long run, so I've been feeling things out.

My hope is to gain some advice from you all on how I can improve my general CV/resume. In my previous job hunt post graduating, many of my applications were rejected or never looked at, and I fear that it is my resume rather than the experience I have.

Thanks a ton - any critiques or suggestions are so greatly appreciated!

So next year, I will be taking the instrumental analysis (analytical chemistry) and physical chemistry sequences both with labs at the same time. A little bit about my previous coursework, I did really well in ochem 1 and 2, inorganic chem was difficult for me, and I would consider myself generally pretty strong in math subjects. Although, I did struggle a little in calculus 2. I am not the best at physics and I struggled a lot in physics 2 but I do understand the basic concepts.

Do you guys think both of these sequences at the same time is doable? It is going to be my last year of undergrad so those are going to be my main classes along with maybe one or two electives not related to Chemistry. Therefore, I can heavily focus on those classes. Also if you have any advice to be successful in both courses that would be greatly appreciated!

Hello! I graduated with my PhD in chemistry this past year and found a job (entry level industry position) after about 6 months and 300 applications. The future isn't clear for me at the moment, and I may consider a big move within a year, so I'm hoping to fix up my resume for applying to other industry positions, government jobs, teaching positions, post docs, and just anything in general. I really don't know what I want to do in the long run, so I've been feeling things out.

My hope is to gain some advice from you all on how I can improve my general CV/resume. In my previous job hunt post graduating, many of my applications were rejected or never looked at, and I fear that it is my resume rather than the experience I have.

Thanks a ton - any critiques or suggestions are so greatly appreciated!

I've been using a paper notebook to keep track of my work and it's a lot of hassle whenever I need to return to old experiments and/or use the data, modify something etc. I'd like to switch to an electronic lab notebook where I can easily import spectra, graphs, tables and of course write notes. Any suggestions? I've seen elabftw, scinote, elements, dotmatics but don't know which one is the best for specifically analytical chemistry :)

Hi Reddit – I am a professor of Chemistry and also a professor in several other departments/programs including Neuroscience and Physiology, all at the . My research has two major themes: one is developing new analytical tools to characterize the chemistry occurring in small volume samples, and the second uses these tools to understand the chemistry occurring in the brain. More specifically, I study novel neurochemical pathways in a range of animal models.

Perhaps more important to the suggested topic of the AMA, I am the Editor-in-Chief of the journal, , published by the American Chemical Society. This journal receives thousands of submissions each year. With the help of a talented team of seventeen active researchers (our expert associate editors), and the thousands of peer reviewers who donate their time and expertise, we publish about one third of the submitted manuscripts.

Last week was and I thought it would be fun to discuss how manuscripts are selected to be published. Thus, I am here to answer your questions and have discussions on the peer review process, or on anything else you have in mind. I’ll be back at 1 pm ET (10 am PT, 5 pm UTC), so AMA and I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

I am online and ready to answer your questions. Thanks all for your participation.

Thank you again for participating in this AMA. I hope it was a positive experience for you! Please let me know if you need anything else.

I am looking for a Phd in Achem with some instrumentation experience. I am looking for a lab director to work with cannabis. I utilize HPLC and GC/MS in my quantitative and qualitative assays to determine concentrations of target cannabinoids. I am based in colorado and would love to speak with someone who thinks they can help.

Chemistry undergrad here -- I really enjoyed quantitative analysis and have a few questions for analytical chemists. What would you consider your average day? What degree do you have? Do you do research? If so what kind? What kinds of jobs do analytical chemists do? What kind of job do you have? Is it fulfilling? If given the opportunity, would you focus your chemistry degree on anything else?

Dear fellow Reddit biochemists,

I hope this post finds you well.

In my country, the jobs available for students who complete their degree in chemistry/biochemistry are mostly related to analytical chemistry. I believe this to be the case in many countries, specially those countries where available capital to fund R&D is smaller.

In most job applications the job requirements usually include the techniques one is expected to be familiar with, mostly GC, HPLC, etc. But, to succeed in this field, what other technical skills and knowledge are useful? Sample prep techniques? Chemometrics?

I would be glad if someone could provide their feedback and advice.