[00:00:07] Speaker A: Hello friends, loyal listeners and bears everywhere. Welcome to the Sound Barrier Podcast, the official podcast of Northeast State Community College. We're coming at you today from Wayne Basler Library here on the Blountville campus. And say thank you to our dean of the library, Mr. Chris Demas, for making this little stick studio opportunity here for us. And of course all the librarians at Basel Library for all their help with what they do.
My name is Thomas Wilson. I'm here today with my co host, Mackenzie Moore Gent and we have a very special guest on this episode.
He's new, but not exactly new to Northeast State. He's Assistant Professor Dr. Sam Stevenson. He's here today to talk about a new program, a chemical laboratory technology program we have here at the college that Sam is going to be heading up and teaching. And Sam, welcome. Glad to have you.
[00:00:59] Speaker B: Thank you, Tom.
Well, my name is Sam Stevenson. Just a brief background on where I grew up, all that sort of thing. I was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona. I'm Tucson native and one thinks of deserts well. What I miss about Tucson most is the sunsets. They're spectacular.
In any event, I was at the University of Arizona as a student after high school and I got drafted for the Vietnam War. Undergraduate I did a BS in chemistry with a it was ACS certified at Northern Arizona. And then I did a PhD in organic at University of South Carolina.
And then right after that I went to work in industry at Eastman Chemical Company here in town 1982.
And I worked there for some about 10 years and polymer research and some analytical techniques that we'll talk about.
And then I went on to work in the pharmaceutical industry and fine chemical industry in, in Europe, in Holland, in, in Delft, Holland with a company called Gist. Procadus and GB is the largest biotechnology company in the world. They do and their core technology is genetic engineering where they engineer microorganisms to produce certain enzymes that we use, say in laundry detergent or textile processing or things like that. And so it's a very interesting industry.
There's a lot goes goes in there's a lot of biotechnology that goes into a pair of jeans, believe it or not.
And so it's chemists that bring that kind of technology to the front.
After I retired from industry, I came here to work actually and then as a professor, as an instructor for the chemical laboratory for the chemical technology program that was here then I helped bring that one up and it lasted for a few years and I went off to Washington D.C.
to work with the American chemical Society where I was the principal investigator for a National Science foundation grant in chemical technology education.
And I did that for five years and then went to Alabama.
I told my wife that the next move is hers. And so she's just finished her doctorate in higher ed and administration and she was employed by a colleague and friend of ours now, Colonel Jim Benson, and she started as the academic dean at the military college, Marion Military Institute in Alabama. And I followed her and went to teach chemistry down there after my work with the National Science foundation was over.
And then after all that I went into academics full time and I retired when Covid hit, forcibly retired and I got bored, tired of playing golf. And so I came back into academe and Northeast State has welcomed me with open arms and they had been receptive to my challenges of I want to put something else on the party, into the party, into this kit that we have where we can serve the local population with something besides chemistry courses, like a program that, you know, where people can go through a two year degree and come out with a credential and knowledge and skills that lead to a very profitable career.
So that's my background, that's what I've been through and that's why I'm here.
[00:04:35] Speaker C: Amazing. Very. So you had a career, decades in the industry, decades in academia.
[00:04:41] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:04:42] Speaker C: What led to the creation of chemical laboratory technology? You said that there previously been chemical technology.
[00:04:50] Speaker B: Right.
[00:04:51] Speaker C: How does that differentiate?
[00:04:52] Speaker B: It wasn't terribly differentiated. It's just different words we're putting on it, different names. We're putting on it now as an industrial scientist, which was my research, those were my research days. As an industrial scientist, you work alongside people that we call laboratory technicians. Where as the, as a scientist you have a research project and under the umbrella of that research project, a number of sub projects are the foundation for that main research goal.
And you're working with the team and as a research scientist, and the team has with it a cadre of laboratory technicians that help actually do the work. And the polymer chemists, or the chemists like me, we're actually in the lab with the technicians doing the work. And so chemical technicians, laboratory technicians are a crucial, crucial part of the team that goes on to make products in industry.
And so that's where this whole laboratory technology comes from, is the people that are hands on doing the work, running the instruments, doing the analysis, interpreting the data and collaborating with the scientists about what next steps are, what do some.
[00:06:11] Speaker C: Of these analyses look like, what do some of the data, what exactly are they working with, how does it apply to industry?
[00:06:18] Speaker B: Well, industry, if industry is involved in the chemical, well let's say the chemical process industry, if you're in the chemical process industry, you need to know that you've made what you think you've made.
And these instruments that the laboratory technicians use tell us, tell whoever's looking at the data what the properties are of that material. Is it pure, is it a mixture, what are the structures of the components, so on and so forth. And so it's an in depth analysis of the output of the, of whatever reactions occurred in the lab.
[00:06:55] Speaker C: What are some examples? Maybe.
[00:06:57] Speaker B: Okay, well I'm an organic chemist and so if I have say a five step process to my target molecule and let's say A, B, C, D, E and so on, so forth. So my F is my target. If I'm making molecule B and turning it into molecule C, whatever that might be, I have to know at the end of that effort if I've actually made that molecule before I go on or, or to what extent I've made it or how pure is it or how impure is it. Has something else come into play that we weren't anticipating in the process that we used to make that molecule. And so that's how industry uses this technology. They use the same technology as high powered academics.
There's not a, there's no special instrumentation or technology in academe that industry is not using and fully. And so if you really want a good hands on experience with using current state of the art technology work in industry, that's where it's at.
[00:08:05] Speaker C: And how can this time locally with like local industries? I know that we're very close to.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: Eastman, Eastman chemical, Eastman Chemical Co.
BAE is a, they manufacture, have a history of manufacturing explosives and compounds that are of that nature.
We have Domtar here in town, it's a pulp and paper company. They have a lot of chemistry based products and processes. We have nuclear fuels services over in Irwin, Tennessee, they focus on nuclear fuel. So there are some specialty, you know, adjuncts I would say that would go along but a lab tech would go to say nuclear fuels and work as a lab tech in whatever area they would, they would be interested in.
We also have some pharmaceutical formulation houses here in town or in this tri cities where there's small, relatively small pharmaceutical that have carved out a niche and maybe consumer products or a generic pharmaceutical, something like that where lab techs and chemists would be working.
And so there's a lot of application that is, you know, for this type of degree and for this technology that is not immediately evident to the consumer, to the average bearer. And so, you know, people know what a radiology technician is, but they probably have never heard of a lab technician.
And so that is, that is, that is what we're trying to address here is that industrial need for laboratory technology.
Degreed individuals as part of the workforce. There's a big demand, high, low supply, high demand.
So it meets a big need.
[00:09:55] Speaker C: Promising then.
[00:09:56] Speaker B: Very promising indeed.
[00:09:58] Speaker A: What kind of ICE courses and what type of hands on experiences in labs can Northeast State students expect? And kind of the second part of that question is why should students not be afraid of chemistry or organic chemistry? Because that sounds, it may sound daunting to a lot of students, but why should they actively get into it and pursue it and not be afraid of it?
[00:10:22] Speaker B: Let's answer that second question first.
[00:10:24] Speaker A: Let's do it.
[00:10:25] Speaker B: The chemistry is the foundation of everything that occurs around you, but it occurs at a level that you cannot see.
The chemistry of biochemistry, for instance, the chemistry of life, those are all based on the same chemical principles that we would use in the laboratory.
And so chemistry is not something to be feared. It's actually a beautiful script, I call it a script of how matter interacts with itself in an, in an, in a very predictable fashion. And so what makes this world tick is occurring, but it's invisible to you as the outside observer. Because we live in the macrocosm, chemistry is in the sub microcosm.
And the sub microcosm then builds up its various layers to come to three dimensional objects that we can see and come across in our lives.
And so chemistry is not something to be feared. There's, there's a tiny bit of math involved in this program, pre calculus algebra, but it's not the math. And sometimes people are.
Math is not their friend. And so that could be a deterrent for somebody, but that's just a preconceived notion. Chemistry probably has a bad rap because people don't know anything about it.
They've probably heard more negative than they have heard positive.
But it's a beautiful, beautiful story about how matter interacts with itself. And it's awe inspiring.
It really is.
[00:12:07] Speaker A: Is it kind of the architecture of the, the living world as we know it?
[00:12:10] Speaker B: Exactly. What it is, Tom, is the architecture. Molecules have three dimensional structure.
Yeah.
[00:12:16] Speaker A: So that, yeah, I wanted to ask you about that.
[00:12:18] Speaker B: And because they have three dimensional structure, it's like buildings have three dimensional structure. Everything that we see in our physical world has a three dimensional structure. Well, so do molecules and so chemistry is the science behind the study, behind those three dimensional molecules and atoms that make the molecules.
And so I've always been fascinated by it because it tells me how the world operates at a level, at the most fundamental level.
And I see the beauty of it that I see is the design, the innate design of how inanimate matter interacts with itself in very predictable ways. And the outcome is always the same for very predictable reasons.
And the body of that information is called chemistry. It's absolutely beautiful.
[00:13:11] Speaker C: I kind of have a question, just kind of zooming in on this. You said molecules and the way they interact, it's predictable.
How does that tie in with like maybe this is so off base quantum physics and how some molecules change based on observation?
[00:13:28] Speaker B: Yeah, it's completely outside of my realm of expertise. I have, I have no clue.
I do not profess to be a physicist in any way, shape or form.
For me, chemistry is simply defined as the exchange of electrons.
[00:13:44] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:13:45] Speaker B: And electrons are around a nucleus, and the nucleus based on the number of protons in the nucleus that defines the element. And so that big periodic table is just a chart of atoms different that are differentiated by the number of protons, the positive bits that are in the middle of that nucleus. Electrons are around that proton, around that nucleus. And when the electrons, when the outer electrons around that atom interact with the outer electrons of other atoms, they share those electrons. And when they share electrons, they make a bond. And when you make a bond, you make a molecule.
[00:14:26] Speaker C: What tools or instruments do you use to see?
[00:14:30] Speaker B: We use a lot of tools because matter interacts with light.
We can use the entire electromagnetic spectrum to look at atoms, to look at molecules, because molecules will interact with all levels of light at some level, at some. And so X rays, for instance, will produce.
Matter will interact with it very differently than say, something which is less powerful. Say, let's, let's look at the.
We have the visible spectrum, which kind of sits in the middle in terms of the colors that you and I see, that we're privileged to see. There are, there are other, there's other light on both sides of that visible light that we can also use to interact with matter. And molecules interact with infrared light in one of these spectrometers that we talked about in the lab.
So an IR spectrometer would use infrared light where the molecules interacting with it, and it'll give you information, but you don't see the molecule interacting with that light. It's just vibrating with that as induced by the wavelength of that infrared spectrum and or we can use in very long ways that we use in another model, another analytical tool called nmr, which is nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Don't be afraid of it. It's just a tool that organic chemists use to look at atom to atom connectivity in a molecule.
And so these instruments based, and so we used light, basically the electromagnetic spectrum and instruments that use a certain portion of that spectrum to interact with that matter. And the way, the way matter interacts with that input, we can discern structural attributes to that molecule based on its interaction with a certain wavelength of light.
I don't know if that makes sense, but it's, it's just, they're, they're boxes that interact with matter. Matter interacts with the radiation inside that box.
[00:16:35] Speaker C: That last statement I think made the.
[00:16:36] Speaker B: Most sense on the hands on part. We're, we're a two year college now compared to a four year university or a four year college for that matter.
Two year colleges typically get the crumbs that fall off the university table when it comes to legislative budgets, in my opinion. You don't have to include that in this broadcast. But, but our funding as a two year college is typically less endowed than say the funding of ETSU or Vanderbilt or University of Tennessee.
So two year colleges don't have a lot of money as a result, we don't have a lot of money to spend on the fundamental sciences because we're sitting in a location where there's a high concentration of industry.
We are blessed to have this college invested and industry, local industry, invest in the program, invest instruments and purchase instruments that a normal two year college would not have because of the concentration of industry in this area. And so to answer your question, we have infrared spectrometers and then we have a UV visible, we have UV visible spectrometers. Then we have, I mentioned the NMR spectrometers. We have two of those. We have one coming up and another one in hand.
We have other instruments. Chromatography is the way we separate mixtures of molecules. We can do that in the liquid phase or the gas phase. We have all those. Eastman has given us two gas chromatographic chromatographs that we can incorporate into this lab tech program.
Because gas chromatography, GC is an important tool that chemists use to understand percentages of products in a mixture. Or it can be used at a larger scale to separate those mixtures, those molecules from that mixture.
And so it's both qualitative and quantitative.
And so we have much of the instrumentation that A university would have already and we're blessed to have it, as most of your colleges do not.
[00:18:55] Speaker A: Is this an associate degree program and a certificate program or are we just doing.
[00:18:59] Speaker B: This is an AS degree program.
There is a certificate program in chemical process technology. Yes. And that's called the CPO's Chemical Process Operators, I think.
And that's a one year program that is given that is administered by another department in the college.
But it's what people do in the physical preparation of chemical materials in a plant. And a chemical plant. The laboratory technology is completely different.
It's in the labs, it's doing analytical work, it's doing R and D research and development.
It's the forefront, it's at the forefront of future products.
And so once a product becomes a product and it's gone through that entire menagerie of the process of going from concept to product, it's an amazing process. But anyway, when it gets to product, then chemical process operators are the people that facilitate in the manufacturer or whatever that chemical product is. But it's the lab techs and it's the chemists and other scientists we call spectroscopists that are at the forefront of tomorrow's products. And that's what we do in R and D.
We're looking towards the future.
And lab techs do exactly that. They have their hands on all these instruments. In this program, students will use all of these instruments and they will interpret their own data. We give them the information, we tell them how to do it, what the instrument does, so on and so forth. And so they understand the theory behind the instrument. But. But more importantly, they get hands on experience at operating the instrument. They do their own reactions. And then once they do the reaction, like any chemist, they have to analyze the products. And so based on the type of reaction, they may have two or three different types of instrument work that they need to do. Well, we have the instruments to do that and they go off and do those in prescribed ways. They collect that data and together as a team.
These are teams that are working. Kids are. These students are not working as individuals. They're part of a team. And so that team then comes together to talk about that information to, you know, did we make what we think we made or did we make something different? If we did, what is it and why?
And so it's very, very hands on and very.
It's. You have to use your noggin.
It's not just doing, it's doing and thinking.
Critical thinking is a big part of this curriculum. Quantitative reasoning is a big part of this curriculum. But all that comes together through these instruments that we've been talking about in the lab. And so these instruments are important only insofar as they're useful in telling us if we've made what we think we've made.
That's the bottom line. Did you do what you think you did? Mother Nature may not always agree with your pathway.
[00:21:57] Speaker C: What causes? I guess what causes? Maybe, say, a group of students didn't end up making what they thought they did. What could have gone wrong?
[00:22:05] Speaker B: It could be an error, could be human error, could be maybe a reagent was contaminated, we didn't know about it, or maybe a bottle was mislabeled. That's very important. Everything has to be labeled. So, you know, all liquids look alike unless they have a label on them.
Most of them do anyway. And so everything in the lab is labeled. And so there may be a labeling issue. There could maybe a compound has been chemically degraded, it's been exposed to light, and it's not what we think is what's in the bottle is not what we think it might be or should be based on the label. And so there's a lot of things that come into it that might preclude making what you think you've made.
Or maybe the analysis was wrong, the instrument could be wrong.
[00:22:50] Speaker C: Have you ever experimented when you were working over in Europe?
You were doing a lot of lab work there?
[00:22:57] Speaker B: I was doing lab work, and I was also doing marketing. Doing marketing work as well. And strategic planning. Yeah.
[00:23:04] Speaker C: Did anything ever surprise you in your lab work as a chemist?
[00:23:07] Speaker B: And Absolutely.
[00:23:08] Speaker C: What surprised you the most? I think I'm all right.
[00:23:10] Speaker B: Well, let me tell you about that.
When we. Let me tell you about the chemistry of genes. There are.
Cotton is called cellulose. It's a natural polymer.
And starch is the same polymer but with a different structure at one carbon in that ring. And so starch and cellulose, wood and cotton, are the same structurally, but starch is almost like wood, except it is just slightly different in one of the. At one of the sites in each of the repeat units. And so the bricks aren't made exactly the same. So you can digest starch because you have an enzyme that's amylose. You can digest amylose because you have an enzyme in your stomach called amylase. Well, that's an enzyme mixture that breaks up the starch molecule.
You ever seen a horse or a cow chewing on it on a fence post? Yeah. Well, why is that? Because Cellulose, different than starch, can be digested in their.
In their system because of cellulase. They have cellulites. We do not have cellulase in our bodies. And so we cannot digest wood or woody materials, which is called a diet program. It's why you eat lettuce to lose weight, because it has a lot of this.
These what we call beta glucans that your body cannot digest. They just pass through. It's called fiber indigestible fibers.
And they're almost the same as starch, except they're slightly bit different on one of the repeat units in any event. So to answer your question, all right, so we have textiles.
And so cotton is. So most jeans are made out of cotton. Let's say. Let's say we have a pair of cotton jeans. When that textile is woven, it has a. It has a. Denim has a top layer of dye on it called indigo. It's an indigo dye. And so each of those yarns before it's woven into a fabric is dyed with indigo. So there's an indigo surface and that fiber, but below the endicle surface is the white cotton.
And so the enzymes that are used to cause. To weaken the cellulose structure are called sialase.
And cellulose will degrade the cellulose so that when you wash it after it's been treated, a lot of that blue dye will come off because that's at the surface of the yarn. And. And that yarn has been degraded at the surface, and it falls off. And that. And so what you're seeing on a worn pair of jeans is the part of the yarn that is not. That has been removed where the dye has been removed. Cellulase weakens those yarns at the. At the surface especially. And so that's where genetic engineering comes in. Well, where do you get cellulase? You don't go to the cellulase store. There is no such thing. You have to make it.
And so there are certain microorganisms that can be genetically engineered to produce a cellulase that will be used for this market.
Well, there are competing cellulase producers that we're not all cellulases are the same. One cellulase will give you a different. A slightly different hue or color to the gene. Another one gives you more of a worn look. And so chemists in this area compete with the. Their products compete with each other based on the outcome of using that chemical in the processing of making that pair of genes. And so my big surprise was I was using a low grade sort of enzyme where I chemically modified the, one of the enzymes in that mixture and it came back as a high end product rather than a low end product, the textile.
And that was the big surprise for me. I thought it might have a stepwise change, but I had a big, big change in the outcome of the textile outcome. And so I just modified the cellulase mixture with a certain chemical and it made a completely different looking textile, completely different pair of jeans once it was washed. And so, yeah, that was the big epiphany for me. Wow, I didn't expect that.
So that was, that was kind of cool. And also in chemistry, as in any branch of science, you have to be open to. If you didn't, if the data comes back and it's, and you can't make sense of it, you really have to rethink what's happened there. And when I was doing my, my doctorate, I was working on this linear synthesis that we talked about, remember A, B, C, D and E. While I was working on a compound that was, you know, a few letters down in the AlphaB and I had done, I did a reaction erroneously actually, that was more concentrated than I thought. Anyway, it gave me the product that was several steps down the line.
And because it wasn't the information I was expecting, I was upset. Oh no, what's happened? Well, I discovered a new reaction, a tandem reaction. It was that we could make sense of it once we understood, oh, this is what happened. And then you can rationalize the pathway by which that happened. And so you have to be open to serendipity. Serendipity is a big part of innovation, I should say, in technology and science.
But anyway, the lab technician, the laboratory technicians are exposed to the essential core competency, the essential courses where the students learn the theory and then they go into the lab to apply whatever we've turned, talked about to making molecules or doing, making transformations of some sort and then analyzing the changes that they've made. And that's what a lab tech does. No matter if you're in the medical industry, if you're in the, you're serving the biotech industry, if you're doing environmental analysis or if you're doing chemical production, you can be in any number of industries.
Instrumentation. And so instruments are used, are tools that we use that the lab techs use to, to discern structure of the structure of what they've, what they've made or what the other scientists have made so that we can move on to, to the next step.
[00:29:32] Speaker C: And so you've already. Okay, so that gives us kind of a good idea of what exactly they'll be learning and where they can join the workforce, where that lies ahead in their futures. What. How's the program structured? What kind of classes, what kind of courses are involved with the degree?
[00:29:47] Speaker B: Very good question.
General chemistry is again, it's nothing to be afraid of. Just take a general chemistry course. Gen Chem one, Gen Chem two.
That's in Alabama, or, excuse me, in Tennessee. That's called chemistry 1110 and 1120. That's general chemistry.
So you'll have a year of general chemistry and you'll be taking other core courses that go along with an associate's degree, literature and English and all the core courses that are critical for an associate's level degree.
And then after that, you take organic chemistry in your second year, and it's in the second years where you have. You're just inundated with chemistry. The second year you have organic chemistry.
You'll have environmental and environmental chemistry in the fall of your second year.
New course. That's the new course being taught this coming semester.
And then in the spring, another new course that is coming along where you'll be taking the second semester of organic in your fourth semester here, you'll have the capstone course called Integrated Laboratory, where you use all the instruments to solve a fairly complex problem, and you do it with a team.
And so the students learn to make things and analyze the things that they made.
And that's the capstone project, and that's called Integrated Instrumental Methods.
And that's chemistry 2550. I think in the catalog you can find a curriculum guide. If you go to the.
If you go to the Northeast State website and up in the search box in the upper right hand corner, if you just type in Chemical Laboratory technology, it'll take you directly to the curriculum guide for this degree program.
[00:31:39] Speaker C: I'm sorry, what in the world? What's the difference between general and organic chemistry?
[00:31:43] Speaker B: Good question.
General chemistry is. People don't know it while they're taking it.
You realize it after you've taken. It's kind of like, what did I see? What was that?
General chemistry is the toolbox of chemistry.
When reactions occur, heat is involved.
A reaction going from reactants to products may go to completion or it may not.
That's called equilibrium. So students learn about the heat or energy of a reaction. That's called thermodynamics.
They learn about the equilibrium. How far forward does the reaction go? Or is it. Or are the reactants favored over the products.
And so if a reaction occurs is energy, to what extent is equilibrium, and how fast a reaction goes is kinetics.
Those are foundational in general chemistry. So those topics are addressed in general chemistry. They're just topics that, in other areas of chemistry that if you need to go into that area, you pull out of the Gen Chem toolbox and use that information to develop, say, organic chemistry things in organic chemistry. And organic chemistry is molecular structure. It's all about structure. And using those various tools in that Gen Chem course to make molecules. So general chem and organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon.
If you look at your periodic table, if you look at the, the top row, they have the two towers on the left and the right, and in between, on that first, the first row there, there is an atom called carbon, and it's number six in the periodic table. Six tells the.
It has six protons in its nucleus. Carbon has a unique ability to make multiple different.
To bond with itself in multiple different ways that no other element in the periodic table has. And that's why it has such diversity in its reactivity and the types of molecule, the types of molecules that can make. And so what's present in the Earth? Well, we have water, hydrogen and oxygen, and we have carbon.
And if I read somewhere, the percent carbon in the Earth's crust is less than 1%. It's about 0.9%, if my memory serves me well.
But the entire biosphere, plant and animal, are made of carbon.
[00:34:06] Speaker C: Is it because we breathe?
[00:34:07] Speaker B: When you breathe out, you breathe out CO2. Okay, okay. When you breathe in, you breathe in oxygen, but you don't use all the oxygen that you breathe in. You only use part of it.
Plants breathe in CO2. How does the plant grow?
What makes it bigger? Well, it develops mass. It creates. It has mass. Yes, it gets bigger. So more mass is used to make. Well, that is CO2. CO2 is used by plants as food to grow.
And so there's synergy between oxygen and CO2 in our environment, where the animals exhale CO2. And when, when an animal dies, the resulting products are typically, at the end of the day, largely carbon dioxide and water.
And when plants die, they are carbon. When they, when they decompose, they're carbon dioxide and water. And so the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom are synergistic in this world that we live in, which is really, really cool.
So that's how that, that's the synergy in which the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom operate is what the intake. The intake for one is the output for the is and their output is the intake for the other. And so they feed each other.
And so the more CO2 you have, the more. And there are some ill effects in the atmosphere. But plants need carbon dioxide to grow.
That's where their mass comes from is CO2.
And the biggest reservoir for CO2 in the atmosphere is not man made, it's from the ocean.
Gases are soluble in the ocean, gases are soluble in water.
And so the biggest reservoir of CO2 on the planet is the ocean. And so if, and gases are soluble in water at a limited extent, but if the water heats up at a very, just maybe a tenth of a degree, gases are less soluble. Warmer temperatures, gases are less soluble. And so they leave, they have the energy to leave the solution and go into the atmosphere. And so a lot of these fluctuations that we see in our CO2 atmosphere are normal climatic changes that have been occurring over millennia and eons.
And they're normal, cyclical, you know, cyclical patterns are perfectly normal in the weather of the earth, the planet. Anyway, we got off on a tangent there, but I think to address your question, they're synergistic. The plant kingdom and the animal kingdom are synergistic. The input, the intake of one is the output of the other and they feed each other.
[00:36:52] Speaker A: Now you mentioned a little bit about the job market. There's a, there's a high demand, we have a low supply. And the capstone program sounds a bit like trying to mimic the real world, a real lab sense that students can get if they're working with, working within a team and trying to produce a result.
How does the program hope to bridge that gap? I know we've got great industry partners to do that with.
[00:37:21] Speaker B: Every experiment is real world.
Every experiment, the capstone course is real world insofar as it puts all the other real world experiences together.
And so you can't learn everything at once. And so you learn the bits and pieces as you go and then you assemble those pieces to make, to make more informed decisions, let's say, about what's gone on the.
So the, the capstone project is real world. And every reaction that a student runs in any of our courses and every chemistry course has a laboratory component. They're all real world or hands on real world experiments. They're not theoretical. It's honest to gosh, real world stuff.
Cool.
[00:38:10] Speaker A: What now? I also have a question about.
You've been in the industry for, for as you said, several years, very rich, very rich background in industry and academics.
[00:38:21] Speaker B: Nicely Put thank you for that.
[00:38:25] Speaker A: What were. Now obviously read the news. There are gaps you see in health care, medicine, food, water, the environment.
What gaps did you, you and your colleagues see 25 years ago that chemistry that you have seen chemistry fill as we are today? And what are the gaps that we're going to be looking at right now that chemistry hopes to fill tomorrow? And how are Northeast State students going to be able to contribute to filling that gap? And I mean diseases, clean water, edible food, no gmo? I'm not, we're not advocating GMO food here by any means.
But where, where are the next solutions that we're going to have to find?
[00:39:15] Speaker B: Let me start with a preamble.
When I was in graduate school, every Friday or every other Friday, we had an outside speaker come through and we had these, one of these, the day we had one of these big hotshot international hotshots in organic chemistry come talk to us.
And so this speaker is sitting in a little auditorium talking to 150 graduate students and one of the organic chemistry grad students said, well, have we done everything that there is to do in organic chemistry? And he said, yeah, pretty much just have a little mop up work to do here and there.
Well, he couldn't have been more wrong. Nanochemistry came along, nanoscale chemistry, nanotechnology came along quite by accident, by the way.
And so yeah, it was a curiosity. We wanted to know how carbon at a certain, in a certain state would, would what its physical properties might look like. And boom, nanotechnology was born. We couldn't have predicted it. Hindsight's 20 20, of course, but nobody was beating the bushes to make that, to just to make the make, to make the first fullerenes or the, or the, you know, the precursors for nanotechnology, they happen quite by accident. And so to answer your question, Tom, it's a little bit difficult to see, to predict about, to predict what the next steps are going to be. You can see close, you can see the things that are on the close horizon. But the quantum changes, the big leap changes, they're awfully hard to see. And some people are more gifted at it than others.
But in terms of science, raw science, I think some. You asked me the question, what was one of the gaps 25 years ago?
25 years ago we had a problem that we didn't know we had and that was environmental pollution with plastics in the environment.
Yes. And you've heard of nanoplastics being in the ocean and, and having horrible effects on the plant life. And animal life and the ocean, the marine life.
Well, we didn't know about that 25 years ago.
If you thought about the mass, the mass of material being produced, 80% of the chemical process industry in the entire world, 80% of that output is polymers.
Not the. Not the really sophisticated pharmaceuticals that you take or the. Or the dyes that might be used in clothes or the, you know, the lubricants or whatever. 80% of the mass is polymers.
And most of those polymers are non biodegradable.
And so when the population grows, the human population grows, the demand grows with it.
And so what was happening is one of the polymers is called a polyester.
The word for it is polyethylene terephthalate. Pet. Let's call it pet.
Yes. When somebody says polyester, they're typically talking about pet.
Well, there was so much pet being made that it wound up as barges, basically little islands in the ocean.
And they're everywhere. So recycling was the big challenge.
And when it became evident. So that was our gap, because we didn't know that we would be faced with a huge plastic pollution problem. Even though it's intuitively obvious, the more you make and you throw away the. The, you know, the amount of plastic garbage is going to build up.
And so what's happening today is the innovation where we're taking those polymers, those polyesters. Eastman's one of the big dogs on the porch here. They're taking the pet, maybe the bot, maybe bottles, it may be textiles, whatever. And they're recycling it to the. To the. To the raw materials to make more pet.
And so they're adding a life cycle to the material.
So basically, we can turn a polyester T shirt into a polyester bottle.
All those Coke bottles that you use, all the bottles that you use for water and Coke and beverages, all that can be transformed into a textile.
Does that blow your mind?
[00:43:35] Speaker A: It does, just a little. A couple of molecular changes is all it takes.
[00:43:39] Speaker B: We just tear it down, we build it back up. And so the beautiful part about the industry is it's reacted to the crisis Eastman is, and I'm really proud of them.
They've answered the call. They've taken a big step and a big, huge investment where they're taking waste polyester and making raw materials and selling those raw materials for other people to make the polyester that they used to make.
And so they're in the business of making polyester, but also in the business of renewing the polyester raw materials. And so they're getting the Raw materials from the waste to make more polyester.
[00:44:24] Speaker C: So you said you have to break it down a bit and then you can turn a shirt into a bottle.
Would students in this program be using the. Would that take the machinery, the tools, the instruments?
[00:44:35] Speaker B: They won't be. We don't have any fiber technology. We don't have the ability to make polyester fibers, but we have the ability to make polyester films. And so they're going to make polyester films in this course that this called.
It's called Industrial and Environmental chemistry. A big part of that is polyesters polymer chemistry.
And in that course they're going to make polyester films and they're going to use various analytical techniques to see how big the molecules get, because polymers are just big, long molecules and the length of those molecules can be controlled by the conditions. And so they'll be observing changes in conditions and they'll be observing changes in molecular weight or how long the molecules get. And then the environmental side of the course is they're going to tear that thing down and they're going to look at the other side of that glass to see how effective the recycle process is in making the same raw materials that they started out with. And so, yes, we're going to take poly, we're going to make polyester films, and then we're going to break down those polyester films right back to the starting materials that they started with.
[00:45:46] Speaker C: Could we kind of dive into some of the equipment and the instruments, everything that they're going to get their hands on throughout the course of this challenge? Your degree, what is that going to look like for them?
[00:45:56] Speaker B: Well, they'll use the basic toolkit for organic chemistry. And these polymers are all organic molecules. And so their starting materials are organic, little smaller organic molecules. And so we use infrared spectroscopy to look at the functional groups. And a functional group in a molecule is just a site of reactivity. Typically it's an oxygen or maybe an oxygen nitrogen bond somewhere in a molecule and a carbon molecule. Anyway, so they're going to use ir, we call it just ir, infrared.
And they're going to use NMR to characterize organic molecules. They're going to use chromatography, both gas and liquid chromatography, to separate mixtures in a reaction. That's a normal organic. That's what a normal organic chemist does. And so they use ir, nmr, they're going to use GC and hplc, high pressure or high performance liquid chromatography. They'll be using that as well, they'll be using UV visible spectrometers that we have a lot of, to look at to measure various properties in molecules that have what we call a PI cloud or a PI system. And so they're going to be using all these lab, they're going to be using all these lab instruments over the period of two years and they'll be using them over and over and over. It's not a one time, it's not kiss it once and you're done. You're going to be using these things over and over and over. And so you're going to get used to using them and know what your data is and you're going to be applying them to more complex problems as they go through the curriculum.
[00:47:35] Speaker C: And then once they get through this program, what can they expect in the job markets salary wise?
[00:47:43] Speaker B: Job market is very good right now, especially locally.
Covid had the same impact on Eastman as it had nationwide or worldwide, we should say.
And that's where everything kind of came to a standstill. Well, that disrupted the job market and the, the pace of the job market extremely.
And so right now there's a shortage of qualified people in to, to operate. To work as chemical laboratory technicians requires an associate's degree.
It's not like you take a course and you're turned into an analytical chemist. It's not it at all. It's a two year degree. That credential is important to operate as a chemical laboratory technician in any of the industries that are regional in this area.
The tools that are used in that program are the same tools that a graduate student would use in a PhD. There's nothing different. It's just the problems are bigger and so they're getting hands on applications, use and application of these instruments. The job market is very good, it's strong because a lot of the baby boomers are retired and baby boomers that work lab techs are now retiring. And so the, the, the gap is growing in all job markets, but especially this one where you have skilled trained people to fill that gap.
They're in fewer supply. Why? Because most of the people don't even know about it. I mean, the average person running down the street, going down the street, doesn't know about what a lab tech does. Probably never even heard of a lab tech. But they know what an X ray tech does.
They all know what a nurse does, they all know what coaches do.
So things that they've been exposed to, they know about, but things that have never been exposed to, they haven't. We're all clueless on it.
[00:49:32] Speaker C: Well, even though if they have been exposed to it, they just didn't know.
[00:49:35] Speaker B: Didn'T know how it's applied and exactly. It's just awareness. And so our biggest. And so the average salary if you look at, if you go to I think salary.com or something like that. Anyway, I did, I did some work.
The average salary online work. The average salary for a chemical laboratory technician is right around 55 to 60 thousand dollars per year.
That translates to a little more than 26 dollars an hour for a 40 hour work week. They can also expect most companies, all companies are going to offer, you know, benefit packages like you know, health and dental and retirement benefits and things like that.
And so they can expect a normal competitive package as far as salary and compensation, you know, insurance and things like that.
So right around 60,000 and it's. That is regional. The average is probably about for the nation I'm guessing my information says it's around 55.
So anyway the local area industry is competitive and is has salaries that are commensurate with the nation and the world really.
And so right at the 55 to 60 thousand dollars would be a nice start for a two year degree. Hello, two year degree.
A four year chemist is going to make not much more than that interesting.
[00:51:05] Speaker C: Okay. Because that was actually my next question.
[00:51:08] Speaker B: Most four year chemists are lab techs.
[00:51:12] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:51:14] Speaker B: The benefit of a four year degree in chemistry is that it leads to a graduate degree somewhere else that can be in medicine, it could be in pharmaceuticals, it could be a PhD in one of the chemistry, chemical sciences or chemistry related sciences, materials science, so on and so forth. And so a BS in chemistry, and this is Sam Stevenson, strictly a BS in chemistry is not a whole lot better than just a regular associate's degree in chemical laboratory and chemical laboratory technology.
And so if you want a BS in chemistry, it's with the notion of well, maybe there's a requirement that they have to have a BS degree in chemistry to get maybe a marketing job or a certain job elsewhere in the company that doesn't involve the laboratory. You know these companies, these huge chemical companies have more than just labs and pipes and manufacture. They have a whole marketing and whole marketing arm and products, new products functions that BS chemists, you know, would be a good slot, be a good fit for. But you're not going to find a lot of BS chemists in a laboratory. Most of those are going to be chem lab tech, CLTs chemistry. The chemical industry tends to be on Both edges of the spectrum. Either you're a two year degree or a PhD.
There's not a lot in between that makes sense.
[00:52:42] Speaker C: So someone who sees themselves years from now, maybe working in pharmaceuticals, they would come to Northeast State and major in just chemistry like a transfer pathway and Then move on. B.S. and graduate school. So this is more just, this is two years.
Two years.
[00:53:00] Speaker B: And you have more than what the four year. I mean you don't have the. When you need to get a two year degree here in, in laboratory chemical laboratory technology, you have under your belt a whole lot more chemistry than a rising junior in a BS chemistry program.
[00:53:16] Speaker A: A whole lot more very popular for the non traditional student.
It's a very, it's a big part.
[00:53:23] Speaker B: Of our population as Northeast State is a community college. And that's the beauty of this college of all community colleges is they serve the needs of the population in terms of transforming career opportunities and transforming their education backgrounds into something that is going to allow a better lot in life for them if they go through that program.
And that's the beautiful. That's why I love teaching at two year college. I've taught at universities and graduate programs and so on and so forth. And I wouldn't trade teach in organic, I teach organic here because I love the students, students I know I'm helping. If I'm teaching organic chemistry as I have at universities, I'm talking to 200, 300 people that are in grade 14 rather than have an adult experience in life and have responsibilities outside of going to class.
And so that are pre meds or pre vets or whatever. And so it's a different population, it's a different, completely different dynamic.
That's why I love working here.
[00:54:29] Speaker C: So someone hears about the chemical laboratory technology option now, but they're a little intimidated by science, intimidated by mathematics. Even though I know that you've mentioned minimal mathematics. Really what's advice you would give to someone who might be interested in this? Dipping their toes in the water, but they're still unsure.
[00:54:50] Speaker B: There are some resources for people that people can go to for information.
One of the best things to do is have a conversation with somebody who's doing the job.
Maybe an uncle or an aunt or somebody who knows somebody or come talk to me, make an appointment with me, I'll talk to you all day long about your career opportunities in chemistry at whatever level.
Also the American Chemical Society, ACS is all things academic and education where chemistry is concerned. And so ACS standards, there's 160,000 members and ACS chemists that are members just in the United States or members of the American Chemical Society. And many of those are academics. And those academics as a collective set academic standards. But they do it under the ECS tent.
And so ACS exams in general chemistry, ACS exams in polymer chemistry or organic chemistry or whatever the BS curriculum or undergraduate curriculum has available.
ACS has standardized exams that people across the United States take.
Our classes are taught to ACS standards.
Our students meet or exceed ACS mean standards. The mean average since say a 70 question test, the mean might be 35. Well, 50% looks like a failing grade. Well, that's percentile. It's actually 50th percentile. Equates more to like a 70% or 75% on a hard scale.
And so our students meet or exceed the national percentiles in general chemistry and organic chemistry.
Mine do certainly.
And so they're getting the real class, they're getting the real thing, even though they're at two year college. And that could possibly be because the level of maturity of our students is probably as a whole greater. And students take ownership of their education more so as a young adult than they might as a grade 14 or grade three attorney, you know, and so they own the process. They are investing in themselves. They're paying the tuition, they're paying the costs, their partners are helping them, their children are surviving without them at certain levels while they make this transition. And so they have a whole lot more invested. And that's the beauty of our college, is we are integral in helping people get to that next step. And it comes forth in the classroom. It's very evident when you're teaching, you know, to be around the people you want, people who are.
Everybody wants to sit in the front rather than everybody wants to sit in the back.
[00:57:39] Speaker C: And they'll be working on teams too, eventually.
[00:57:42] Speaker B: They're all about teamwork. Industry is teamwork. Teamwork, teamwork. There are no lone soldiers in industry anywhere.
You know, there might be some industry icons, but a team put them at that icon level.
You are part of a team. And so if you're in a job interview anywhere in the industry and somebody mentions teamwork, you need to have a warm fuzzy feeling about teamwork and have experienced teamwork. And the classroom is a great way to do that. The laboratory is a great way to do that, to begin to install this teamwork notion which is not content in academics anywhere. It's how you interact with the information, with each other, your fellow students.
[00:58:26] Speaker A: You sound very excited about, really about the program and about being back at Northeast State. What are some.
You've talked about a lot of. What are a couple, like the really things you're excited about to be getting back in the classroom this fall and seeing it happen with students.
[00:58:42] Speaker B: I'm sorry, say it again.
[00:58:43] Speaker A: What are you kind of most excited about seeing. To get back in the classroom this fall and seeing something students again. What kind of has you.
[00:58:49] Speaker B: What am I really Just about.
I. I'm. I'm really excited about teaching a new a course that I haven't taught in quite a while. Polymer chemistry. Polymer that industrial. What they call it. What's called industrial chemistry and environmental chemistry.
You can make it what you want, but because 80% of the products out of the chemical process industry are polymers, we're going to talk a lot about polymers. And what are we going to do? We're going to interact with people in the area. Eastman is one where we'll talk about. We'll use some of their technology that we don't have. Maybe I'll ask them, well, can you run this certain analysis on this polymer so that we can see what we've done even though we don't have. So we have partnerships with local area industry where we don't have the instruments that are not used a lot in academe but are used a lot in industry where we don't have. Can't afford those instruments. We can go go to industry and say run our samples for us and they'll probably turn right around and do it and give it right back to us.
[00:59:46] Speaker C: Amazing. And I know you'd mentioned it. Donated several instruments. Big item instruments bachelor.
[00:59:51] Speaker B: We're talking 70 $500,000 instruments each.
[00:59:55] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:59:57] Speaker B: Yeah. These instruments go for $125,000. They're not cheap, invaluable to teach students.
And they're teaching instruments. Why? Because they're going to be using the same instruments when they go to work.
And so they're learning on the instruments that they will be using two years later in a professional capacity.
And I'm excited about chemistry. I just love it. So. I can't believe they're paying me to talk about this stuff and to run this program. It's a passion. It's on my bucket list.
[01:00:28] Speaker C: To do what you love.
[01:00:29] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[01:00:29] Speaker C: You cross this off your bucket list?
[01:00:31] Speaker B: No, not crossing off the bucket list. It's just getting started.
[01:00:34] Speaker C: Just getting started.
[01:00:35] Speaker B: Yeah. This is sweet. Yeah, this is one of my bucket list deals. I want to make sure this one grows and grows big.
Yeah. I'm excited about it. And the science itself is just so awesome. It's so awesome to see how matter interacts with itself in such predictable ways, with such predictable outcomes you can do. It's like having a kitchen that is well stocked. What do you want to have for dinner tonight? I don't know. What do you want to make? Oh, God. That's chemistry.
[01:01:01] Speaker C: It's a little overwhelming if you think too.
[01:01:03] Speaker B: Yes.
That's the latitude that you have in a chemistry lab. It's the same latitude you have in a kitchen. In fact, kitchen is just food chemistry is all it is.
[01:01:15] Speaker A: Food chemistry.
[01:01:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:01:17] Speaker C: And everything's chemistry.
[01:01:19] Speaker B: You're just doing chemistry in the kitchen. It's just not. You don't know it's chemistry.
You don't know that you're using the mallard reaction when you bake bread or you toast a Dorito.
You don't. You don't know that you're using hydrolysis chemistry, hydrolysis reactions when you're, you know, melting butter and things like that. And so it's the chemistry behind the things that you do every day without thinking about. It's how matter interacts with itself. And if matter interacts with itself anywhere, it's doing so in the kitchen.
What's a common denominator in a kitchen? Heat Energy.
Ah, so we're converting A to B using energy.
Yes. You're just, you're doing it. You just don't know you're doing it.
[01:02:05] Speaker A: Flour. Baking soda.
[01:02:06] Speaker B: Flour. Yeast.
Boom.
There you go.
[01:02:09] Speaker A: You got bread.
[01:02:10] Speaker B: You got bread.
Or. Or carbohydrates. Yeast and.
Yeah, and carbohydrates. You got beer.
I'm a brewer and I lived in Holland for a while and I was in Holland for a long number of years and I learned all about the chemistry of brewing science. And so you could do a lot of things. That's just it. When you learn, when you get a toehold in something, you can expand your knowledge. You don't have to stop learning. You get a toehold in something, you go on and do something else with that basis, with that foundation.
That's what I've done my entire life. I've made so many different jobs for myself that I've pretty much done a lot of it. And this is one of my bucket list jobs, is to recreate this program, get it online, and to help people local, my local community, fellow citizens, make a better lot for themselves either in academe or here at a two year level.
[01:03:09] Speaker C: And that's it. On today's episode of the Sound Barrier regarding Northeast State's newly launched Chemical Laboratory Technology program.
Thank you so much, Professor Stevenson, for joining us. You can listen to all episodes of the Sound Barrier. Just check
[email protected] or follow us on Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, any streaming service. Really. We're on them all. Thank you again for tuning in. And stay tuned for the next episode of the Sound Barrier.