Analytical Chemist, Corteva Agriscience

My name is Joe Crawfey, and I work at Corteva Agriscience as an analytical chemist. An analytical chemist is someone that performs high quality tests. In my field, we perform high quality tests to support registrations for our crop protection products globally. We can see a sample, there's physical chemistry experiments that are done, which is testing pH, stuff like that. We also have characterization of the materials. We're checked in the actives to make sure they're within spec. We have store stability. We test store stability, as well, so it's a kind of a broad spectrum of things that we do. We usually do a pH test. We can do those. We do flash points. We do characterization, as well, which we use an LC instrument, HPLC or GC that's basically testing to see how much of the active, or how much of the active is in the formulation. We do, I mean, there's several tests (laughs). I am in a lab probably 50% of the time, and I have my own office, as well, and I'm probably in there 50% of the time. So when you're in the lab, you're usually preparing samples and then running them on the instrument. When you're not in the lab, you're usually quantifying your data, writing reports. We work in what's called a GLP environment, and so things have to be documented a certain way, and so that takes up a lot of time. The way I describe it to people is, when you have toothpaste, you know, toothpaste is not actually what's taking care of your teeth. It's actually the fluoride that's in the toothpaste. The toothpaste is kind of what we call a formulation. This is what we use to be able to apply it to the crops. So it kind of works the same way in agriscience. So we have a formulation, whether it be a granule, or it be a liquid, or how that's applied to the crops is how we use that to apply our actives and our material, and so you can have several different materials that you're working on at the same time. Typical busy day for me would be, in the morning I'm trying to get samples prepared and run on the instrument, making sure that they run properly, and then at the, in the evening, while those are running, or in the afternoon, I mean, I'm probably quantifying data that I ran before, making sure I QC my data, making sure it's under GLP conditions, and then maybe start a report, hopefully, by the end of the evening, or maybe the next day.