-: My name is Michael Kelsey and I'm a laboratory manager.
Well we make ethanol,
so we'll make beverage-grade ethanol,
we also make beauty, personal care products,
a little bit of pharmaceutical-type things.
We also make fuel ethanol and industrial-grade ethanol,
so perfume bases and things like that.
Well first and foremost, I'm kind of in charge
of data collection for the company.
We do train quite a bit, a few of our operators
to do the tests on a day-to-day basis.
So I make sure that the tests
are set up correctly for them, or manage
one lab tech for that.
I do lab ordering, fill up our consumables,
all of our test-type reagents.
I do that also.
Any special projects we wanna do, anything chemistry
or science related, if we're developing a new project
or we want to try a new chemical or enzyme,
something along those lines,
I'm definitely a point person on that.
Well we have quite a few scientific instruments.
We have a lot of chromatography instruments,
gas chromatography, high-performance liquid chromatography.
We have an IR, infrared, UV vis-type situation.
And we'll actually put our samples
in these instruments and they'll give us data back.
And my job is just to make sure
that the test conditions are set up correctly
and that it's generating usable data.
There is some travel.
My company, particularly, that I'm with right now,
they are very big about continuous improvement.
I'd say I travel about 10% of the time.
We do have a 24-7-358 day a year operation,
so if something breaks at midnight or 2:00AM,
I'll get up and fix that and make sure
that we're always in control of our process
and that we're always meeting
the specification for our products.