Sr. Materials Scientist

Location: Johns Creek Lab

Job Summary

Imerys is looking for an experienced hands-on researcher to :

• Drive business growth, focused on new product development programs, process development, and application development.
• Increase team’s core competency in the research and development of inorganic (mineral)/organic particulates for use in food and beverage production, animal feed, agriculture and pharmaceutical applications.
• Build and lead New Product Development programs in response to customer needs.

Important to this role is the understanding, use and manipulation of interfacial chemistry to create new mineral-based solutions with breakthrough properties and performance, with a large component of this role involving direct lab work.

Key Tasks and Responsibilities

• Promotes and maintains a safe work environment for self and others. Manages projects of moderate size & scope; makes substantial contributions to determining feasibility of team goals and objectives.
• Leads or assists new product development including new particle/process/method development and/or testing and characterization tailored to applications, scale-up from laboratory to commercial scale including plant or customer site trials.
• Responsible for taking New Product Development samples from the lab, or beta-products from production, to the customer to run validation trials, and bring back actionable results.
• Lead resolution of complex multi-variable technical problems by planning, conducting, analyzing and interpreting carefully designed statistics-based experiments to rapidly determine root causes, and interconnection of variables.
• Design tailored experiments to synthesize and benchmark the performance of synthetic inorganic materials based on specific customer requirements
• Write technical reports documenting scientific work, analysis, and conclusions. Communicate results via technical and business-focused presentations.
• Keeps current with technical literature and IP and use that knowledge to generate ideas for new products and applications, be a point-of-contact with our IP Legal team, translating discoveries and results into patent applications.
• Builds and maintains relationships with technical counterparts at customers, service providers and marketing teams.
• Leads or assists in external programs with universities/institutions or other Imerys business units to evaluate emerging technologies.
• Facilitates development and professional growth of others including junior scientists and technicians

Skills and Attributes Requirements

• Strong desire to work “hands-on” in our laboratory or at customers’ facilities.
• Strong interpersonal and team work skills
• Strong technical, troubleshooting & data analysis skills, strong communication skills (spoken and written).
• Strong background in surface chemistry/surface modification preferred.
• Capable of working independently, multi-tasking and balancing priorities while working on multiple projects concurrently.
• Able to explain technical concepts in non-technical and clear language
• Proficient in statistical analysis. Knowledge of Python and/or R a plus.
• Experience with process chemistry and process development.
• Proficient in the setup of standard analytical test methods. and can train analytical technicians to deliver accurate results.
• Ability to lead a multi-disciplinary, multicultural, New Product Development project team
• Ability to adapt to a fast-paced and changing operation.
• Experience with water-soluble, crosslinking ionic/non-ionic polymers is a plus.
• Experience with data analytics/machine learning in materials science applications is a plus.

Education/Experience Requirements

• PhD or MS in Material Science, Chemistry, or Chemical Engineering
• At least 5 years’ experience in an industrial R&D function