Hello, welcome to the careers for kids where kids learn careers.
This is Maxwell Valencia.
And this is Henry Morrison.
And today we have Lisa Lamb , a chemical engineer.
Thank you Lisa Lam for participating and joining our careers for kids podcast.
Thank you for having me.
I'm so excited to be here.
So tell me your name and what you currently do right now.
So my name is Lisa Lam.
I work for a consulting company in life sciences.
And I am the senior director of technical operations.
Can I tell you more about what my team?
So I have a team of engineers and project managers.
So I have process engineers, automation engineers, facilities engineers, and then technical project
managers.
What inspired you to become a part of this industry of biotechnology and how you got
to this position?
So my inspiration was my university senior advisor.
When I was about to graduate from university with my degree, I wasn't quite clear on what
industry I wanted to go to.
Most chemical engineers go into the petroleum industry.
When I was graduating, there was not a lot of jobs in the petroleum industry.
So he recommended that I consider this new, at the time was up and coming industry called
biotechnology.
And I started that career and that was 30 years ago.
What part of your job do you enjoy the most and not enjoy the most?
What I enjoy the most is interacting with the clients and doing designs that will help,
you know, doing designs on projects and really helping the patients out the most.
That's what inspires me.
In my career, any time that I hop out with the manufacturing of any of the drugs or treatments
for people, that's what's the most inspiring.
It helps the patient, helps people's lives.
Yeah, that's great.
It's got to be really rewarding knowing that you're actually helping people.
Yes, it is.
The first company that I worked at used to have patients come and visit and whenever
they would come and they would just be very thankful.
Even now thinking about it, it gives me goosebumps.
It's very rewarding.
You see a lot of people who are very passionate about it.
A lot of people that I work with will get emotional and sometimes get teary-eyed because
the patients are so thankful.
That's really great.
Like, how you do this, how you inspire people to help people.
It's like an amazing job.
Yes, and it's fun.
I love the people that we work with and I love helping kids like you who are interested
in this type of career in the STEM field be extremely interested in this.
I'm super passionate about it.
Was this the dream job you imagined yourself doing when you were a kid?
It was not.
I did not know this job even existed.
I thought I was going to go into mechanical engineering.
When I thought about engineering, I was introduced to mechanical engineers and I thought that's
what I'm going to do and I'll build stuff.
When I started at the company that my senior advisor told me about, I learned about the
life sciences and what I really love is because I love the biology, I love biology, I love
chemistry and then I was very strong in math and physics.
I got to take all that and at some point in my career I used all that and continued to
learn about it.
I still continue today to learn, learn, learn, learn from people.
Who were your adults?
It doesn't have to necessarily be a chemical engineer.
You'd be someone who inspired you to do something.
You know somebody who really inspired me to do something is Maxwell's great, I think he
would be your great grandfather.
Let me think about this.
This is your dad's grandfather.
Your great grandfather.
Your great grandfather is your dad and my grandfather.
He was a civil engineer and I was always interested in engineering because of him and I learned
a lot about what he did as an engineer and really it was about problem solving and that's
what engineers do.
We solve problems.
It's just in different fields.
That's amazing like how you solve problems.
Big and small.
That's like an amazing career to have.
And that's what you learn as an engineer.
It doesn't matter what kind of engineer you are.
You really learn about how to methodically solve problems and I love that because you
can always get to a solution.
It might be different than the way Henry comes about it, the way Maxwell comes about it,
the way Lisa goes about it, but there's always going to be a solution.
Nice.
Okay so why did you pick this specific job?
So my current job now is leading a team and why I picked this specific job is because
about two years ago as you both know we were in a pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic right?
And I had been in part of the industry called medical device and we would make product,
my company made products for when you have a broken bone in your foot.
That somebody reached out, a friend of mine reached out to me and said you know we would
love to have you join our team and it was helping to impact the COVID pandemic.
And it really really spoke to me where I thought I feel good that my current company helps
people with broken bones but I would feel even better helping in a global pandemic and
helping globally.
I understand how impactful it would be to everyone like they're fixing people's bones
and during a pandemic that is super super good.
Yeah.
It influences everyone's lives.
Yes so a company that I worked that I was helping was we built a facility to help with
the vaccines.
Another company that I helped with they were helping to make the test kits for doing COVID
testing.
Okay.
So sometimes you go to that when I went to the emergency room with an ear infection and
I saw the piece of equipment that does the that does the that accepts the COVID test.
You know you do the swab and then they put it into a machine to do the test diagnostic
and I saw it there and I thought I worked for that company for a little bit.
You know I did a project there so that was really cool.
Yeah it's really cool.
What's the biggest highlight of your career?
The biggest highlight of my career oh boy.
So I would have to say that I got to be I got to help build I got to be a lead engineer
on building a new facility and it was in Portland Oregon.
So that was pretty neat because it was the first time that we were building my previous
company had built the facility outside of California built it from the ground up and
then and then we basically spent three years doing the design and then the construction
and then the startup until we were able to make product make drugs out of it.
That's really cool.
Yeah that was really fun.
What are the biggest challenges that you think can be solved by my generation that you would
want us to solve for you?
Oh my gosh that's a tough one because there's so much out there that your generation could
really help out with.
One thing I think would be really to help in my opinion maybe manage social media type
of things better to make sure that people kind of keep mentally healthy.
And then for you guys you know the sky is the limit or it might be that the moon is
a limit or mars is the limit.
So I think as long as we're able to keep the environment going and you know and you guys
continue to just improve on everybody's lives.
That's all we can ask for.
My passion is to make sure that we try to do improve lives so that you can continue
to improve lives.
If someone wants to follow in your footsteps in your careers what would you tell him or
her?
I would tell them to continue to do to continue educating themselves whether it or not it's
formally it doesn't have to be you know go to a university.
But I think it's important to continue to improve yourself be open-minded and really
learn to be a strong communicator.
Communication is really really important.
What is your life advice for kids listening to this podcast?
I'm going to say it's about learning to communicate.
I would say learn to communicate in every way possible.
So whether that be written especially in speaking.
So speaking written so verbal written and then in the other media's you know like social
media like you know electronically.
But I think learning to communicate face to face is very important.
I think that that's starting to be a little bit of a lost art and I think it's really
important because a lot of a lot of problems arise if you have because of miscommunications.
So the better you are communicating the easier the easier time you'll have whether that be
working on a project working with a client working with team members.
I watched you two communicate and I thought it was awesome how you kind of got to okay
let's get going.
Because like face to face communicating like you can really like you can like tell what
a person is like almost tell what a person is feeling over text you can get like a completely
different idea of how they're interpreting it.
Totally totally right.
That's the next thing.
I didn't mean that and then it's like you put it in all caps you know.
So yeah that's really good advice.
Thank you.
Yeah thank you so much for your time here.
Unfortunately it's done.
We finished everything.
Okay.
See you bye.
Thank you very much for having me.
I love meeting you Henry and I hope to see you soon Maxwell.
Bye.
Bye bye.