Happy Sunday everyone!! It has been a hectic couple of days but glad to have a relaxing Sunday! We have dinner plans with Michael’s family to celebrate his birthday and his mother’s birthday! I hope you had a relaxing day also!! Counting down to the holiday break!!
For this week’s Science Sunday I wanted to go more personal and talk about what I do with most of my week! Hope you enjoy getting to know a little more about me and what I am passionate about!!
So what is my day job?
You may be wondering what I do during the day that isn’t The Chic Chemist! Well I am a formulation chemist at a generic pharmaceutical company. I graduated the University of Delaware with a Bachelors of Science in Biochemistry and a minor in Medical Diagnostics. It was definitely a tough go about but I did it and it is still my greatest accomplishment to date!
I had hopes of going on to become a Physician’s Assistant however that did not turn out as expected. No worries, I bucked up and found a job in the pharmaceutical industry! I worked as a pharmacy technician at a CVS for about 2.5 years so I figured why not this could be great!
So what is a formulation chemist you ask? It is an awesome job honestly!! I work in research and development for generic medications! I get to take a brand name product and figure out it’s intricate details to make it a generic product. One of the biggest things my job entails is reverse engineering. Reverse engineering means to take something and break it down into its individual parts to figure out the entire composition.
Once the reverse engineering is done, you can begin to make formulation prototypes until you find the closest match to the brand product. There are certain tests that the FDA requires and will get done and there are certain tests that need to be done for long-term understanding.
Once you have the reverse engineering done and the process set, you can make a large-scale batch! If you have a successful large-scale batch you are set to make more!
The large-scale batches can be filled in whatever the container is and placed on stability at different temperatures to determine the shelf life.
Throughout the entire process a written report is composed that describes each step. A fellow colleague once told me it is like writing the story of the product. Pretty neat when you think you’re basically writing the autobiography of that product.
At the end of stability the shelf life is determined and the product can be submitted to the FDA!! They take their time in reviewing the documents and as long as everything passes in their mind the product is approved!
It is a pretty intense process and there are details I won’t go into but it’s so cool and so fun to work on a product start to finish. My favorite part of the whole thing knows that eventually what I’ve worked on could really help someone. That goes back to what I really want to do in life, which is help people. I’m getting there slowly but surely. I have no doubts that I will work my hardest to help as many people I can.
Thanks for reading and learning about what I do with most of my time! Don’t hesitate to ask any questions, I’m an open book!!
Love always,
~Scientist Z~
Loving the outfits! 😘