Melissa: My name is Melissa Olds and
I work at Dow Agrisciences as a formulation chemist.
What that basically is is a chemist who uses a variety
of different sciences whether they be analytical sciences,
organic chemistry, to do product development and in this
case it's agriculture products.
One of the interesting things about my role is you have to
have an understanding of science and basic principles of
science but also business as well because it's a product
that's ultimately going to be sold in the market place.
Understanding what product you're going to be developing
and its uses in the market, how somebody wants to use it,
or their desired attributes, is very important because you
want to incorporate those into your design.
Then you will create experiments around that to get to
your end goal and ultimately the commercial product that
will be sold on the shelf and customers will purchase.
That product needs to both have the attributes that your
customer is desiring but also it needs to have the
scientific backing behind it, both chemically and
physically stable.
You don't want any interactions going on between the
different components that make up that product.
For example if you purchase a personal care product on
the shelf you don't necessarily want it to turn your
hair purple when you wash your hair so we will do
different experiments in the lab, testing it under
different conditions whether it's going to be used in
a cold temperatures of North Dakota or the warm
temperatures of Central America.
We want to make sure that it's going to
withstand all of those.
So there's a couple different products
that I've worked on globally.
One of them recently launched within
the last few years here in the U.S.
It's used on soybeans, Surveil Herbicide, you can look that
up on YouTube, and it has a unique attribute that we
looked for and how it handles once it's added to water
which was an attribute the customers were looking for.
You can look at that video and see how that particular
product behaves in water compared to other products
in the marketplace.