This memoir is dedicated to those interested in learning about the mundane life of a China-born separation scientist and his career in the American industry.
My Career as a Separation Scientist: Part 3
Late Career at Genentech and MWD Consulting
Part 3: Late Career at Genentech and MWD Consulting is the last of 3 articles that chronicle my career as an analytical chemist and writer in separation science. My childhood in Hong Kong, college and graduate studies in New York, and a career spanning multiple industries in America provide the backdrop. Part 3 focuses on my eight years at Genentech in South San Francisco and the relocation back to Connecticut and becoming a pharmaceutical consultant.
Table of Contents
A Recap of Part 1 and Part 2
My Eight Years at Genentech (GNE)
Buying a Condominium (Condo)
Life in California
Genentech's Culture of 『Putting Patients First』
「Projekt ist König」
A Hiring Spree
Managing the Departmental Capital Budget
Learning Drug Development and Going Back to School
Attending Conferences
Traveling and Social Life in California
Family Reunions and Weddings
Getting Serious in Technical Writing
Relocation Back to Connecticut in 2015
The Trans-Continental Move
Major House Renovations
Setting up MWD Consulting
More Training and Conference Opportunities
American Chemical Society (ACS) Career Consultant (2016-2020)
Joining the Boards of CACA and CSSC
More Writing Projects
Personal Branding and a Communication Platform on LinkedIn
『Grammarly』 Coming to the Rescue
My New Life as a Semi-retired Consultant
Acknowledgments
Disclaimer
Postscript
Biography
A Recap of Part 1 and Part 2
Part 1 is a story about my childhood in Hong Kong and the decision to come to America as an international student (My Career as a Separation Scientist: Part 1). Part 2 describes my graduate studies in analytical chemistry and the transition to a pharmaceutical chemist (My Career as a Separation Scientist: Part 2). My technical writing started in graduate school and continues to the present time.
Remember the song, 「I left my heart in San Francisco」? This is true in my case since the 『City by the Bay』 occupies a special place in my heart. San Francisco (SF) is a symbol of coolness, high technology, and entrepreneurship. It is home to many high tech companies and the birthplace of biotechnology. California has superb sunny weather with moderate temperatures without any snow or humid summers. It has the highest residential real estate prices in the United States, where million-dollar homes are today's norm.
I arrived at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) on Saturday, March 10, 2007, with a different mindset. Instead of just visiting, I would call San Francisco home for almost a decade. Upon arrival, I rented a Toyota Camry and drove south to my temporary housing, a furnished one-bedroom apartment at Marlin Cove in Foster City. I stayed there for four months until we moved to our condominium.
Figure 1. The Marlin Cove Apartment Complex in Foster City. From googlemap.com
I reported to work the following Monday for a day of company orientation with 40+ new GNE recruits. At 4 pm, I walked to my new office on the fourth floor of Building #14, where I had a view of SFO. There, I would often look out the window across the Bay at departing airplanes while ruminating on projects.
The next two weeks were spent in acquainting myself with my colleagues, the campus, and meeting with realtors in search of permanent housing. I had my mindset on a condo and spent most weekends checking out open houses. I made a bid for a 2-bedroom, 2.5-bath, two-car garage, 1500-sq ft townhouse condo in Foster City. It was located on a separate island of the apartment complex with water views of the lagoon. My first bid at $700,000 was accepted, and I hired a handyman to install moldings, window blinds, and shelving in the garage and closets. The cost of housing in the Bay Area is several times higher than those in the east coast cities. For instance, I can probably get the same condominium at ~$300K in Norwalk, Connecticut.
Figure 2. A Map of Genentech showing a 200+ acres campus by the San Francisco Bay with over 60 buildings totaling 34 million sq. ft. I started in Building 14 and moved to the brand new Building 43 in 2009.
Figure 3. My condo at the Isle Cove in Foster City. We lived in the second townhouse next to my neighbor, who had the waterfront unit with the Toyota SUV parked in the driveway. The best part was the two-car garage, water views of the lagoon, and the mile-long boardwalk around the island. We paid over $450 every month for maintenance.
Life in CaliforniaLiving in California was comfortable with informal attire, a diverse population, and sunny weather. We did not have air conditioning and rarely turned on our gas heating in the winter. There were plenty of Chinese supermarkets and restaurants close by. We did not feel like part of a minority race here since the Chinese population was close to 10% in the SF area.
It was a comfortable lifestyle for us living in a condo with few maintenance chores, a stable job, with an easy commute. I worked from 8 am to 6 pm. Lunch was taken at one of the five cafeterias on campus with a choice for subsidized meals costing ~$5 (sushi, customized pasta, soup noodles, or salad bar). After dinner, we strolled along the mile-long boardwalk around the island. Bedtime was around 10 pm with the same routine repeating every weekday. I went back to GNE most Sunday mornings to the company gymnasium, followed by a few hours in the office and a restaurant dinner afterward. I worked long hours at GNE but felt oddly energized since I knew that we worked hard to find a cure for cancer.
Figure 4: On Sundays, I parked my Acura TL outside Building 43 and worked for a few hours in the office. Next to my green car were two Toyota Prius hybrids, trendy in California.
Genentech's Culture of 『Putting Patients First』GNE has a strong science-based culture and extensive expertise in the biology of diseases. It employs over 100 postdoctoral fellows who perform fundamental research in disease etiology. Every year, the company publishes numerous research papers in prestigious journals such as Science, Nature, and Cell.
I am a big fan of the ex-CEO of GNE, Dr. Art Levinson, a Ph.D. biochemist from Princeton University. He led the company to prominence in the 1990s by commercializing the first monoclonal antibody (mAb) for targeted breast cancer therapy. He believed that the patient's benefits should be the first criterion on any decision rather than revenues or business risk considerations. Art left GNE in 2009 after the merger with Roche and became the Chairman of Apple and the CEO of Calico at Google. At GNE’s Research and Early Development (gRED), scientists are supposed to devote ~20% of their time to research not related to the company’s projects. gRED has a 『publish or perish』philosophy and strives to hire the best scientists. Hiring selection is based much on the candidate’s record of publications.
I started in the analytical chemistry group in the Small Molecule Pharmaceutical Science (SMPS) Department at gRED. Initially, the group consisted of only five laboratory staff, which grew rapidly to a department of ~50 staff in a few years.
The motto at gRED was 「Projekt ist König,」 a German phrase meaning 『Project is King』. SMPS, often known as Chemistry, Manufacturing, Control (CMC) Department, was responsible for taking new chemical entities (NCEs) into clinical trials. New drug development is an expensive, multidisciplinary, and complex process. It is highly regulated by regulatory agencies such as the United States Food and Drug Administration (US FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA). The process involves the initial characterization of the NCEs' physicochemical properties, scaling up the synthetic chemistry, investigating their pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics (PKPD), as well as their safety (studies in animals, often called preclinical safety evaluation), formulating the clinical trial materials, and refining the processing conditions to ensure the safety and efficacy of the drug products.
Each development project is driven by its own CMC team charged with taking the project to Phase 3 clinical trials. All the scientists in our analytical chemistry group were assigned to one or more CMC project teams, which met weekly. Laboratory work was performed by internal support staff or contract manufacturing organizations (CMOs).
During my tenure at GNE, I was assigned to four CMC projects - an antibody-drug conjugate project (ADC, Kadzyla, or trastuzumab-DM1) and three small-molecule drug projects. My primary project was an inhibitor for prostate and gastric cancers (Ipatasertib), on which I worked from the preclinical (Phase 0) to Phase 2B in five years. This molecule had three chiral centers (the potential to have eight possible stereoisomers). I developed over 40 analytical methods for this project, including those for starting materials, intermediates, critical raw materials, drug substances, and drug products. Most methods were HPLC methods, and about one-third were chiral HPLC methods for measuring enantiomers (molecules that are mirror images).
Being the analytical lead in a CMC team was intensive, requiring quick responses to numerous process development needs. I oversaw many projects outsourced to CMOs. It was not unusual for me to have several teleconferences each day with CMOs located in Asia, Europe, and the USA.
Figure 5. A UHPLC method developed for my primary project is shown here with the drug candidate's structure and the separation of all four diastereomers in the insets. It is a complex molecule with three chiral centers. Details of the project were published by M. W. Dong, D. Guillarme, D. Prudhomme, etal., in LC GC North Am. 32(11), 868-76, 2014.
A Hiring SpreeI helped the group in recruiting research associates, scientists, and scientific managers. This included screening resumes, hosting interviews, and assembling recommendation packages for the corporate hiring committee. Great emphasis was placed on the number and quality of scientific publications, presentations, and regulatory filings. Each candidate was required to give a 1-hour technical seminar, which was attended by the entire department. Candidates were invited to pre-interview dinners and group lunches. This stringent hiring process ensured that we hired the best talent.
Managing the Departmental Capital BudgetFor several years, I managed the capital budget for purchasing analytical equipment in our department, typically over one million dollars each year. The process consisted of preparing the budget, polling the department staff regarding purchase requirements and justifications, scheduling discussions, and facilitating the final decisions. We upgraded our HPLC laboratories with ~20 UHPLC instruments (mostly Agilent 1290s or 1260s and Waters Acquity UPLC), high-resolution mass spectrometers (Thermo Orbitrap and Agilent Time-of-flight (TOF-MS)), a robotics salt/catalyst high-throughput screening system (FreeSlate/Symyx), and the Chromatography Data System (CDS, Waters Empower 3 network). The Department also implemented electronic notebooks (IDBS) and Laboratory Information Management System (LabWare LIMS). Eventually, the goal would be to have the LIMS generate a Certificate of Analysis (CoA) automatically after release testing.
I learned quickly about the CMC process, quality control, regulatory filings, and managing CMOs. On the laboratory side, I learned UHPLC, chiral separations, HPLC/MS, and the efficient development of stability-indicating analytical procedures. In 2013-2014, I proposed two simplified approaches for the rapid development of HPLC methods: 「A Three-pronged Template Approach」 and 「A Generic Universal Reversed-Phase Gradient Methodology.」 References are provided below. These approaches became my signature contributions to separation sciences. I believe that these more straightforward HPLC development approaches can help improve the efficiency of this challenging process in many pharmaceutical laboratories.
M. W. Dong, A Three-Pronged Template Approach for Rapid HPLC Method Development, LCGC North Am. 31(8), 612-621, 2013.
M. W. Dong, A Universal Reversed-Phase HPLC Method for Pharmaceutical Analysis, LCGC North Am, 34(6), 408-419, 2016.
Figure 6. An HPLC lab with 20+ Agilent 1200s, 1260s, and 1290s. All waste-solvents were channeled downstairs to a large collection tank near the loading dock. Each HPLC was labeled with the owners』 initials, who was responsible for its maintenance. The estimated total price of the equipment in this laboratory is likely to exceed 3 million dollars.
The Bay Area is the birthplace of biotechnology and has 500+ pharma and biotech companies. Many of these companies were founded by former employees from the first two biotechnology pioneers founded in the 1970s - Genentech and Cetus.
I felt quite clueless at gRED meetings and annual retreats at Asilomar National Park Conference Center when biology was discussed. These discussions were led by biologists who dominated the gRED staff. I decided to go back to school and so took a molecular biology course as a starter. This course led to a certificate program in Biotechnology from the University California Santa Cruz Extension program. During 2010, I went to evening classes twice a week and most weekends. On school days, I left work at 3 pm and drove 30 miles to San Jose, where I ate dinner at a Hong Kong-style café. I loved this Hong Kong-style café because they were inexpensive, quick, and delicious. I was particularly fond of their milk tea (75 cents) and wonton noodles ($4). The school ran from 6 to 9 pm, taught mostly by pharmaceutical professionals. I completed the ten-course certificate program in 18 months. I was home alone at that time since my wife went back to Connecticut to help my daughter with her newborn second child. I believe that my motivation as a lifetime learner is helpful to my career.
Attending Conferences
I attended two analytical chemistry conferences each year - Pittsburgh Conference (Pittcon) and Eastern Analytical Symposium (EAS). Attendance at conferences was encouraged or even required by the company as all scientists were expected to present at these conferences to maintain their scientific research edge. At Pittcon, I delivered HPLC short courses and organized invited symposia in pharmaceutical analysis. EAS's mid-November timing in New Jersey was convenient because we could take a small vacation and stay with my daughter's family for two weeks until Thanksgiving.
Traveling and Social Life in California，加州的商務出差和社交生活
Traveling is my hobby and favorite pastime, particularly to exotic international places. Business travel was infrequent and consisted mainly of day trips to CMOs for project kickoff meetings (e.g., Wisconsin and San Diego). I only made two big international trips for the company: a one-day meeting in France for the ADC project and a 3-day trip to Ireland for a global joint analytical meeting with other Roche colleagues in 2014.
My wife and I traveled on many weekend excursions. We particularly enjoyed group bus tours during the summer or Christmas Holidays. Our favorites were the National Park Tours, which included an overnight stay in Las Vegas en route to the Grand Canyon. We mostly traveled by tours operated by two Chinese-owned bus tour companies (Lassen or Joy Holidays). We made annual trips to Hong Kong and stayed there for at least two weeks. The exceptions were those for my nephew’s wedding in 2010 (5 days), followed by another 3-day trip to attend my Mom’s funeral a few weeks later. One perk from GNE was a six-week sabbatical, which all scientific staff was eligible for after six years of service. We did that in April 2013 and took an 8-day boat tour of Three Gorges on the Yangtze River from Wuhan to Chungking. We traveled with my elder sister in a25-person group of Hong Kong citizens and overseas Chinese. We made many new friends and maintained contacts after the tour.
Figure 7: Photo of our group taken on the Yangtze cruise ship. We sat together at one large table in the dining hall. The group wasa bunch of characters, all speaking Cantonese. There were my sister and her roommate, a plastic surgery center owner, a banker, a government official, a supplier of roasted suckling piglets, and a distributor of black-haired Australian pigs.
Since my wife and I both have large families, we attended many family reunions. My family had reunions every ten years in the Bay Area in 1997, 2007, and 2017. The 2007 reunion was most memorable and the last one attended by our parents. The family reunions on my wife's side were held in large summer rental houses. The last two (1997 and 1998) were in a beach house at the Dewey Beach in Delaware, followed by a change of venue to a 5-day Canadian cruise in 2019. There were also many weddings for our nephews and nieces. I recall at least four weddings in the last ten years, held in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and two in New York City.
I often wondered how we managed a busy work schedule, training activities, and extensive traveling schedules during our nine years in California. Nevertheless, those were happy days when I had a fulfilling career and an active lifestyle.
Figure 8: The 2007 family reunion was celebrated in Zen Peninsula restaurant in Millbrae, California. Our parents were 89 years old.
Figure 9: The first family reunion of my wife’s extended family in 2013. We rented a large house in the Catskills by the Hudson River in upstate New York. Thirty-five family members lived, cooked, and ate together for four days.
Getting Serious in Technical WritingIn 2013, I received an invitation from Laura Bush, the managing editor of LCGC North America (not the former First Lady of the USA), to be a columnist for that magazine. I immediately accepted this opportunity because this would allow me to become more aware of the latest development in HPLC and increase my professional exposure. I agreed to a column entitled 「Perspectives in Modern HPLC」. I spent hundreds of hours each year, delivering at least four installments. Since HPLC is a mature technology, it is challenging to write articles worth reading by experienced scientists and novices. In 2015, I started a series of four white papers on 『Separation Science in Drug Discovery and Development』. This eventually became the preferred format to provide educational insights to the readers.
In 2013, I was invited by Professor Davy Guillarme of the University of Geneva to be his co-editor for a special issue on 「UHPLC: Ten years after Commercial Introduction」 in Trends in Analytical Chemistry (TRAC). The issue was published in October of 2014, which consisted of 18 papers written by experts in their respective topics. I contributed one paper entitled 「Method Development by UHPLC.」 (See references below). I would prefer to collaborate with my colleagues at Genentech and other external experts to write joint papers because the results are higher-quality publications that include different perspectives.
D. Guillarme and M. W. Dong (Eds.), UHPLC: Where Are We 10 Years After Its Commercial Introduction? Trends in Anal. Chem., 63, 1-188, 2014.
M. W. Dong and K. Zhang, UHPLC in method development, Trends in Anal. Chem., 63, 21-30, 2014.
Relocation Back to Connecticut in 2015
In March of 2015, I left Genentech after working there for eight years and started our relocation back to the East Coast. The move was different this time since it was without a new employer's help and financial support.
The first thing was to sell our condo. This turned out to be simpler than expected since the Bay Area real estate was a seller’s market. We contracted the top-performing realtor (Mary Bee-Thrasher), who came over immediately and gave us advice on the minimum we should do before the open house. Three weeks later, our property was listed, and a weekend open house was scheduled. Two days after the open house, a written offer came in at $50K higher than the listing price.
Figure 10: The living room looks considerably larger in the photo than in real life. Mary Bee brought the flowers, plants, and fruit plate. Our newly installed hard-wood floor looked terrific.
Figure 11: The 『For Sale』 sign outside my spacious 2-car garage with built-in adjustable shelving installed in 2007. I did not buy any new cars in California, and two Honda were shipped back to Connecticut.
The Trans-Continental Move
With the condo under a sales contract, we turned our attention to the transcontinental move. The first task was to find a moving company with a good reputation at a reasonable cost. Next was to reduce our accumulated stuff to lower the trucking cost to the east coast.
We contracted Bekins Van lines that quoted $6700 (~$1/lb). We planned to stay in our daughter’s Norwalk house and buy back our old house afterward. The large pieces of furniture would go into a self-storage warehouse during the temporary stay with our daughter. The last step was to contract an auto-transportation company to move our two cars (2005 Honda Accord and 2001 Acura TL) to Connecticut to be picked up a day before our scheduled flight to New York. We would cover our temporary transportation needs using one-way car rentals from Avis.
On August 31, 2015, we boarded a United Airlines flight with three luggage pieces containing all our valuables and my desktop computer. On arrival, we stayed in the guest bedroom downstairs in our daughter's house for the next few months. Our two cars, furniture, and eighty boxes of our belongings came a few days later, and most went into a 9'x11』 self-storage warehouse. My daughter and her husband spent the next two months looking for another house in Wilton, with a better school district than the one in Norwalk. We repurchased the house in December of 2015 in a private transaction. We were relieved that everything went smoothly in the complicated move.
Major House Renovations
On Thanksgiving of 2015, my daughter's family moved out, and we now owned the same house that we had occupied in 1980. My son-in-law was a handyman and had done substantial renovations, including updating the kitchen and two bathrooms and installing thermal windows and a new central air conditioning system. Nevertheless, there were plenty of remaining projects.
The first two were an update of the master bathroom and painting the house's exterior. We found an honest Chinese contractor from Flushing. He did not cut any corners and commuted with his helper for nine days to complete the bathroom. In the past, I had painted (stained) the house myself. I climbed a 32』 ladder up and down for weeks in the summer. I stained all the shingles with a transparent or brown stain. This time, we hired a professional painter to have it done properly. The project cost us $6000 with two pros working for the entire week. They started with power washing the house to remove mildew, sealing the windows, and then spray painting the exterior with two coats of latex paint. They repainted all the white trim, the deck, and the porch. We were pleased with the outcome of our newly painted olive-green house. Hopefully, the paint job would last for another ten years.
Figure 12: The two professional painters started my house painting project by power washing the exterior cedar shingles with a dilute solution of bleach and detergent. The project took an entire week, and the house looked brand new in olive green paint.
Figure 13: The newly painted Norwalk house, which we owned since 1980, with along driveway topped with ¼」 trapped rocks, a two-car garage, and a front porch.
Next were the projects to trim all the tree sand upgrade the lawn. Our half-acre 150』x150』 property was lined with hundreds of trees (maples, oaks, ash trees). We had a fenced-in backyard with a 3-tier split-rail fence and many landscaping white pines. Five majestic Hickory trees lined the front of the house. The small trees have all grown tall in the last 40 years. I hired a tree service company annually to cut and trim trees.
Next, a lawn maintenance company was contracted to apply fertilizer and weed control chemicals four times a year, plus liming and aeration/over-seeding in the fall. While the cost of fertilizer service was about $70 each time, the cost of aeration was close to $300. The lawn looked visibly improved after a few years of treatment though I often wondered how environmentally sustainable the process was by adding all these chemicals to the lawn.
Finally, we purchased a new dining table/cabinet set, mattress for ourselves, a bunk bed for the grandkids, and modular shelving for all the closets. With the major projects completed, we moved back our belongings from self-storage in February of 2016, a good six months after our arrival.
Being a suburban homeowner in America is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, we have a desirable, spacious environment, with privacy, yards, deck, and garages. On the other hand, homeowners need to be energetic, resourceful, and diligent in their property upkeep since services are expensive for most families.
Figure 14: I paid $75 to have my bulk order of landscaping materials (cedar mulch and pebbles) delivered to the house in 4 hoppers. These materials would be difficult to haul by a homeowner without a strong back and a truck.
Looking back, leaving GNE and relocating back to Connecticut to be closer to our daughter and the grandchildren was the right decision. However, I was not ready for another full-time job or total retirement, as I wanted to continue my training and writing. I thought that my analytical chemistry skills should be marketable as a consultant to supplement my income.
In October 2015, I became an independent consultant focusing on HPLC training and pharmaceutical consulting. I set up a business as a self-proprietor (Doing Business As or DBA) and built a website. I selected a hosting website service (Wix.com) and built a no-frill website in a few days - https://www.mwd-consulting.com. I paid extra to register my domain name (mwd-consulting.com) and a company email address michael@mwd-consulting.com.
Figure 15: The main menu of www. mwd-consulting.com. A 『STARBUCKS COFFEE』 sign inspired my MWD Consulting's logo on the top left, which I designed myself. The main graphical elements are my two books, a photo of drug products, my current associations, and some useful links.
I have been teaching HPLC short courses at Pittcon and EAS since 2003. Not having a full-time job allowed me to deliver more short courses for the American Chemical Society on-line and at their annual national meetings. I made connections through John Dolan with an HPLC training group called Separations Science (sepscience.com based in the UK) and traveled for them to Penang (2016) and Singapore (2017).
The premier conference of HPLC International was a series in which I have given courses and tutorials on UHPLC, quality control, and method development (Anaheim 2012, New Orleans2014). Since then, I have added Beijing (2015), San Francisco (2016), Jeju Island, Korea (2017), Washington DC (2018), and Milan (2019). For us, these traveling opportunities to exotic locations were always the highlights of the year.
Besides conferences, I received invitations from local chromatography discussion groups or non-profit education/research organizations. I traveled about eight to ten times a year until the shutdown because of Covid-19 in March of 2020.
Figure 16. Scenes from Pittcon 2020, which occurred right before the great AmericanCovid-19 shutdown. Photo legends clockwise: We canceled our big Chinese American Chromatography Association (CACA) dinner networking event at Chicago Chinatown and hosted a smaller dinner for the board, and a few sponsors and friends, including Prof. Daniel Armstrong (U. Texas Arlington); Prof. Jim Grinias (Rowan U.) was our winner of the CACA 2020 Young Investigator Award who was presented with a plaque and a cash award of $1000; I posed in front of the international display showing the number of attendees from different countries; I took this photo with a group of Cosplay characters which happened to have their conference at the same Conference Center in Chicago.
Figure 17: I went to Singapore in 2017, right before my trip to HPLC Jeju Island in Korea, to attend a 2-day Separations Science Conference. The photo was taken at the informal dinner with other invited speakers: Davy Guillarme (U. Geneva), Deidre Cabooter (KU Leuven), Dwight Stoll (Gustavo Delphius College), and David Hill (Separation Science).
Figure 18: Scenes from HPLC Beijing 2015 when I was invited to present at a symposium sponsored by Agilent. From left to right clockwise. The Bird’s Nest; The Opening Ceremony of the Conference; The Closing ceremony with hundreds of student volunteers in yellow T-shirts; photo with Frank Steiner of Thermo Scientific, Kelly Zhang of Genentech, and Taylor Zhang (Juno Therapeutics, formerly at Genentech).
Figure 19: The week in Jeju Island, Korea, during the HPLC 2017. We stayed in this beautiful 4-star Booyoung Hotel and Resort next to the conference center. Jeju is a good-sized volcanic island offshore of the Korean Peninsula. From Left to Right: The Opening Ceremony with traditional Korean dancers and music; photo with Kelly Zhang and conference officials dressed in traditional Korean attire; photo with my friend Chris Pohl (Thermo) Scientific at the conference dinner; our hotel in Jeju.
Figure 20：We ate this traditional Korean dinner at the upscale restaurant in our hotel during our last evening at Jeju. The meal was a steak and grilled fish set dinner and came with soup, salad, side dishes, and dessert. The price of $80 for this set dinner for two was a terrific bargain. Korea does not have a tipping culture (just a10% service charge). Our young waiter was pleasantly surprised to receive an extra tip of 10,000 won ($10).
Figure 21: Scenes from HPLC 2019 Milan. Milan is an impressive city full of history, arts, fashion, and technology. Bottom left to right: Professor Alberto Cavazzini spoke at the Opening Ceremony featuring 「 the Music of Leonardo,」 the best HPLC opening program I had ever witnessed; The Chinese delegations at the Gala Dinner of HPLC 2019 in Milan. We dined at an outdoor courtyard at Via Festa del Perdono in a garden surrounded by Renaissance-style columns and ancient pillars. We found out that the Europeans knew how to party as the only ones leaving at 10 pm to catch the last subway train were the Chinese groups. The Europeans would walk back to their hotels after midnight.
In 2016, I became an ACS career consultant and volunteered to help their members in job searching and career development. I was inducted into the group by Bill Suits, an old friend who died from Covid-19 in April 2020. My motivation to volunteer for ACS as a career consultant was to give back to the scientific community by helping younger chemists to select more appropriate industrial career paths. I went to two ACS leadership training conferences in Dallas and Atlanta but was not active until the pandemic hit and layoffs became common. I was regularly on duty at the weekly virtual office hours and had many clients (or mentees). I usually started with a one-on-one video chat, followed by resume and LinkedIn profile reviews, and then advised them on interviewing skills and job offer negotiation as needed. I know the pharmaceutical industry and have experience both as a job searcher and hiring manager.
Joining the Boards of CACA and CSSCA growing population of young graduate students from China is studying in U.S. Universities, with a good fraction of them choosing to pursue a career in this country. While their scientific backgrounds are generally quite good, they may face many linguistic, and cultural adjustment problems. The Chinese American Chromatography Association (CACA) is a non-profit organization that provides networking and career development opportunities. CACA organizes large annual dinner networking events and symposia or workshops at Pittcon and webinars on separation science. CACA uses communication platforms on LinkedIn, WeChat, and the CACA Website (ca-ca.org).
While CACA members are mainly Chinese Americans in North America, all other separation scientists are welcome with free memberships. I joined the CACA board in 2011 and have been active in committees for awards and workshops.
Connecticut Separation Science Council (CSSC) was founded in 1983 by Professor Csaba Horvath of Yale University as an organizing sponsor for HPLC 1984 conference in New York City. The first event was a symposium at Yale in 1983, in which I participated. The discussion group became dormant and was revived by several separation scientists, including Paul Clark, Steve Wong, and myself. In 1988, CSSC was active in organizing workshops and symposia. It also sponsored the Csaba Horvath medal starting in 2004. I joined the director's board in 2016 and helped with the program committee for workshops and the biannual symposia. In recent years, the medal winners were Fred Regnier, Jack Kirkland, Peter Schoenmakers, Jim Jorgenson, Bezhan Chankvetadze, and Milton Lee.
Figure 22. Dr. Lloyd Snyder, one of the widely recognized 『fathers of liquid chromatography』, (together with Jack Kirkland and Csaba Horvath) was my invited speaker at our CACA dinner networking event in a Chinatown restaurant held during the HPLC 2016 in San Francisco. This was likely one of his last public speeches before he died in 2018 at 87. I recall taking my first ACS short course in HPLC with Lloyd and Jack Kirkland at the Penta Hotel in New York City in1973. I am a big fan of Lloyd, a great scientist and one of the nicest persons I have ever met.
Figure 23: A group photo of the CACA board and several guests, including Professors Dan Armstrong (dinner speaker) and Dave Hage, at our dinner event at Joy Sin Lau during Pittcon 2019 in Philadelphia.
Figure 24: Professor James Jorgenson, the inventor of capillary electrophoresis and UHPLC, received the Csaba Horvath medal from Dr. Attila Felinger and Tom Melninkaitis (CSSC President). This CSSC symposium was held at the Yale West Haven Conference Center in October of 2016.
LCGC Columnist: With the successful 2015 series of 『Separation Science in Drug Development,』 I continued to write white papers on relevant topics: UHPLC (2017), 『HPLC modules with an insider’s view』 (2019), and 『stability-indicating method development and validation』 (2020). Each white paper took 50+ hours to write and an extensive review process. Being a columnist for LCGC helped me be more engaged with the newest development in separation science and deliver four papers each year in a widely circulated trade magazine.
HPLC and UHPLC for Practicing Scientists, 2nd Ed., Wiley, 2019.： In April of 2016, I signed a contract with Wiley to write the second edition of my 2006 HPLC book. I completed the writing in 18 months and updated every chapter, and rewrote half of them. I also added three new chapters on UHPLC, LC/MS, and HPLC in biopharmaceutical analysis. The second edition has 70% more technical content and maintains the first edition’s format with an abundance of tables, figures, and case studies. Each chapter was reviewed by at least five colleagues. This took another three months. The new book was published in July of 2019.
Figure 25: M. W. Dong, HPLC and UHPLC for Practicing Scientists, 2nd Ed., Wiley, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2019.
Since I started my consulting business, I have been active on LinkedIn, the leading professional social media platform owned by Microsoft. LinkedIn has six hundred million members from 200+ countries. It is most beneficial for networking, job searching, and recruiting talent. I use LinkedIn to promote my various publications, training courses, conference activities, and my recognition through『personal branding』. I currently have 9,500 followers, most of them engaged in separation science and pharmaceutical analysis.
I write over 100 LinkedIn articles every year, mostly on separation science and pharmaceutical analysis and occasionally on culture, China, science, travels, and suburban living. I spend 1 or 2 hours each day on LinkedIn to respond to questions, sharing news, broadcasting job opportunities, and recruiting reviewers for my articles.
A big help to my writing is a software product called 「Grammarly.」 This software is available as a free download for the introductory version. The premier version is a paid annual subscription and comes as a Microsoft Word add-on. My English writing often contains grammatical and wording issues (e.g., articles, singular/plural, spellings, and tenses). I find it sufficiently helpful to warrant a price of $140/year.
This September marked the fifth anniversary of my relocation to Connecticut. Life was good as more time was filled with family, leisure activities, and travels by not having a full-time job. Unfortunately, all good things came to an abrupt halt in mid-March 2020 with the pandemic shutdowns. All my meetings and travel were canceled or postponed. I adjusted by spending more time on writing, watching Chinese TV series on YouTube, attending webinars, planting a vegetable garden, and lap swimming or yoga lessons.
It seemed surreal as I woke in the morning and found myself at a stage beyond retirement. My separation science training has given me a fulfilling career with a stable income to support a comfortable suburban living. I am grateful for my good fortune and health, which allow for an active lifestyle with travel to many places.
I hope that the best time is yet to come.
AcknowledgmentsThe author thanks the following colleagues for the review of this article.
He Meng of Sanofi, Adrijana Torbovska of Farmahem, Alice Krumenaker of TW Metals, LLC, Kim Huynh-Ba of Pharmalytik, Ke Wu of Abbvie, Tao Chen and Dawen Kou of Genentech, Alan McKeown of Vertex, Oscar Liu of Silver Spring Scientific, Farooq Wahab of U. T. Arlington, Perry Wang of US FDA, Achim Treumann of KBI Biopharma, Jim Grinias of Rowan University, Katlin Grinias of GSK, Davy Guillarme of U. Geneva, Shuang Yang of Soochow U., Peng Yu of EpiQMAx, Shen Lei, Tom Trainer, Dave Locke, Raphael Ornaf, and Linus Leung. Special thanks to Feile Yu, Xaiohua Jing, and Mingyi Chen for their help with the Chinese translation.
This memoir's content is based on the author's experience and opinions to the best of his recollections and knowledge. They do not represent the views of any of the organizations mentioned in the text. The photo and figures came mostly from the author or the internet/literature with citations of their origin. The names of those close to the author were withheld for privacy reasons, except those with near-celebrity status.
Postscript
This three-part memoir was written during the pandemic shutdown of 2020 to chronicle my life stories from childhood, a career in separation science, and semi-retirement as a pharmaceutical consultant. HPLC has been my passion and remains a career anchor in my life. I believe that everyone has their own story though very few choose to have them published. Life is full of pivotal decisions though our daily living tends to be dominated by trivial chores and choices. These stories are often microcosmic reflections of the culture, personal values, and upbringing. With the rising trade tensions between the United States and China, I hope that the two great nations will resolve the differences by understanding each other’s culture, history, and motivations. These considerations were part of the reasons for writing this autobiography and having it translated into Chinese, so my mundane life stories may reach both communities.
Postscript by Michael Dong in Norwalk, Connecticut, on 12/15/2020.
Dr. Michael W. Dong is a principal consultant in MWD Consulting, focusing on consulting and training services on HPLC, pharmaceutical analysis, and drug quality. He was formerly a Senior Scientist in Analytical Chemistry and Quality Control at Genentech, Research Director at Synomics Pharma, Research Fellow at Purdue Pharma, Senior Staff Scientist at Applied Biosystems/Perkin-Elmer, section head at Celanese Research Company, and postdoctoral research fellow at Naylor-Dana Institute for Disease Prevention.
He holds a Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry from the City University of New York and a certificate of Biotechnology from the University of California Santa Cruz. He has 130+ publications and four books, including a bestselling book on chromatography (HPLC and UHPLC for Practicing Scientists, 2nd Ed., Wiley, 2019). He is an advisory board member of LCGC magazine, American Pharmaceutical Review, Chinese American Chromatography Association, and Connecticut Separation Science Council. He has been a columnist of 「Perspectives of Modern HPLC」 for LCGC North America since 2013. Michael was born in Shanghai and raised in Hong Kong. He is multilingual and a long-term Toastmaster.
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-dong-8390548/(connectionwelcome).
MWD Consulting website: https://www.mwd-consulting.com/(30+ articles available)