Carlos Santos

Life is good right now for Carlos Santos, who every weekday morning kisses his new baby daughter goodbye as he heads off to a career he loves.

"Sometimes I can get so into it that I just lose track of time. It's just that kind of job. You're not really counting the hours, you're just driven by what's going on," he says from his office in Union, NJ.

Since the late 1990s, Santos, 31, has worked at Schering-Plough as a scientist developing quality control (QC) methods that ensure the company's wide range of asthma, allergy, and other inhalation products are as safe and user-friendly as possible.

"It involves the developmental aspects of those methods--things like troubleshooting, fine-tuning the product so that it's ready to transfer to our sites," he explains.

After graduating from Seton Hall with a BS in chemistry in 1997, Santos spent a summer interning with GlaxoSmithKline before landing at Schering-Plough, who also aided him in gaining his MS in his spare time.

Santos first spent a semester interning in the company's QC division before moving to methods development. "My experience in Schering's QC department exposed me to a lot of the products that the company has," he says. "It really developed my interest in pursuing this career."

QC demands quick, effective methods of assuring product integrity, and it's up to Santos and the five other experts he works with to come up with those protocols. It's a task he says he looks forward to every day.

"That's because every day is different. There are so many challenges that come up, it helps you to use those skills that you need--the attention to detail, trying to figure out the source of certain problems," he says. "And when you come up with the solution, it's just so gratifying that it drives you to do it all over again."

Eight-hour days are standard, although Santos admits his drive to find the key to a particular problem sometimes keeps him a little later. "You've got to remember that once you're finished with a method, it's not necessarily gone," he says. "If it's flawed, it's going to come back to you and you're going to have to rework it."

His advice to newcomers to the field: get a good grounding in chemistry, hone your troubleshooting skills, and sharpen your attention to detail. "In this job," he says, "you can't really ignore any minor detail and think it's not important. Everything is important."

A final piece of advice: whatever side of development you get into, know your customer. "In our case, our 'customer' is Quality Control. And my exposure to QC, working in that environment helped me a lot--I understand better now what their needs are," Santos explains. "If I'm developing a method that's two hours long for one analysis, for example, I know it's not going to be practical from a production standpoint, where they have many samples to run in a day."

For the right kind of person, those types of challenges are just part of the fun, he says. "To view each day as an opportunity to be better, and to constantly challenge yourself to do so--it's the perfect environment for that."

-- E.J. Mundell