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Hello, welcome to the careers for kids where kids learn careers.

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This is Maxwell Valencia.

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And this is Henry Morrison.

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And today we have Lisa Lamb , a chemical engineer.

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Thank you Lisa Lam for participating and joining our careers for kids podcast.

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Thank you for having me.

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I'm so excited to be here.

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So tell me your name and what you currently do right now.

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So my name is Lisa Lam.

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I work for a consulting company in life sciences.

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And I am the senior director of technical operations.

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Can I tell you more about what my team?

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So I have a team of engineers and project managers.

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So I have process engineers, automation engineers, facilities engineers, and then technical project

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managers.

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What inspired you to become a part of this industry of biotechnology and how you got

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to this position?

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So my inspiration was my university senior advisor.

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When I was about to graduate from university with my degree, I wasn't quite clear on what

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industry I wanted to go to.

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Most chemical engineers go into the petroleum industry.

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When I was graduating, there was not a lot of jobs in the petroleum industry.

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So he recommended that I consider this new, at the time was up and coming industry called

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biotechnology.

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And I started that career and that was 30 years ago.

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What part of your job do you enjoy the most and not enjoy the most?

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What I enjoy the most is interacting with the clients and doing designs that will help,

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you know, doing designs on projects and really helping the patients out the most.

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That's what inspires me.

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In my career, any time that I hop out with the manufacturing of any of the drugs or treatments

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for people, that's what's the most inspiring.

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It helps the patient, helps people's lives.

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Yeah, that's great.

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It's got to be really rewarding knowing that you're actually helping people.

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Yes, it is.

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The first company that I worked at used to have patients come and visit and whenever

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they would come and they would just be very thankful.

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Even now thinking about it, it gives me goosebumps.

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It's very rewarding.

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You see a lot of people who are very passionate about it.

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A lot of people that I work with will get emotional and sometimes get teary-eyed because

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the patients are so thankful.

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That's really great.

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Like, how you do this, how you inspire people to help people.

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It's like an amazing job.

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Yes, and it's fun.

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I love the people that we work with and I love helping kids like you who are interested

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in this type of career in the STEM field be extremely interested in this.

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I'm super passionate about it.

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Was this the dream job you imagined yourself doing when you were a kid?

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It was not.

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I did not know this job even existed.

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I thought I was going to go into mechanical engineering.

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When I thought about engineering, I was introduced to mechanical engineers and I thought that's

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what I'm going to do and I'll build stuff.

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When I started at the company that my senior advisor told me about, I learned about the

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life sciences and what I really love is because I love the biology, I love biology, I love

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chemistry and then I was very strong in math and physics.

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I got to take all that and at some point in my career I used all that and continued to

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learn about it.

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I still continue today to learn, learn, learn, learn from people.

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Who were your adults?

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It doesn't have to necessarily be a chemical engineer.

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You'd be someone who inspired you to do something.

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You know somebody who really inspired me to do something is Maxwell's great, I think he

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would be your great grandfather.

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Let me think about this.

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This is your dad's grandfather.

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Your great grandfather.

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Your great grandfather is your dad and my grandfather.

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He was a civil engineer and I was always interested in engineering because of him and I learned

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a lot about what he did as an engineer and really it was about problem solving and that's

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what engineers do.

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We solve problems.

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It's just in different fields.

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That's amazing like how you solve problems.

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Big and small.

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That's like an amazing career to have.

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And that's what you learn as an engineer.

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It doesn't matter what kind of engineer you are.

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You really learn about how to methodically solve problems and I love that because you

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can always get to a solution.

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It might be different than the way Henry comes about it, the way Maxwell comes about it,

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the way Lisa goes about it, but there's always going to be a solution.

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Nice.

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Okay so why did you pick this specific job?

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So my current job now is leading a team and why I picked this specific job is because

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about two years ago as you both know we were in a pandemic.

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The COVID-19 pandemic right?

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And I had been in part of the industry called medical device and we would make product,

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my company made products for when you have a broken bone in your foot.

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That somebody reached out, a friend of mine reached out to me and said you know we would

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love to have you join our team and it was helping to impact the COVID pandemic.

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And it really really spoke to me where I thought I feel good that my current company helps

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people with broken bones but I would feel even better helping in a global pandemic and

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helping globally.

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I understand how impactful it would be to everyone like they're fixing people's bones

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and during a pandemic that is super super good.

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Yeah.

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It influences everyone's lives.

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Yes so a company that I worked that I was helping was we built a facility to help with

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the vaccines.

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Another company that I helped with they were helping to make the test kits for doing COVID

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testing.

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Okay.

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So sometimes you go to that when I went to the emergency room with an ear infection and

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I saw the piece of equipment that does the that does the that accepts the COVID test.

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You know you do the swab and then they put it into a machine to do the test diagnostic

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and I saw it there and I thought I worked for that company for a little bit.

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You know I did a project there so that was really cool.

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Yeah it's really cool.

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What's the biggest highlight of your career?

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The biggest highlight of my career oh boy.

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So I would have to say that I got to be I got to help build I got to be a lead engineer

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on building a new facility and it was in Portland Oregon.

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So that was pretty neat because it was the first time that we were building my previous

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company had built the facility outside of California built it from the ground up and

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then and then we basically spent three years doing the design and then the construction

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and then the startup until we were able to make product make drugs out of it.

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That's really cool.

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Yeah that was really fun.

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What are the biggest challenges that you think can be solved by my generation that you would

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want us to solve for you?

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Oh my gosh that's a tough one because there's so much out there that your generation could

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really help out with.

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One thing I think would be really to help in my opinion maybe manage social media type

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of things better to make sure that people kind of keep mentally healthy.

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And then for you guys you know the sky is the limit or it might be that the moon is

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a limit or mars is the limit.

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So I think as long as we're able to keep the environment going and you know and you guys

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continue to just improve on everybody's lives.

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That's all we can ask for.

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My passion is to make sure that we try to do improve lives so that you can continue

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to improve lives.

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If someone wants to follow in your footsteps in your careers what would you tell him or

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her?

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I would tell them to continue to do to continue educating themselves whether it or not it's

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formally it doesn't have to be you know go to a university.

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But I think it's important to continue to improve yourself be open-minded and really

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learn to be a strong communicator.

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Communication is really really important.

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What is your life advice for kids listening to this podcast?

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I'm going to say it's about learning to communicate.

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I would say learn to communicate in every way possible.

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So whether that be written especially in speaking.

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So speaking written so verbal written and then in the other media's you know like social

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media like you know electronically.

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But I think learning to communicate face to face is very important.

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I think that that's starting to be a little bit of a lost art and I think it's really

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important because a lot of a lot of problems arise if you have because of miscommunications.

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So the better you are communicating the easier the easier time you'll have whether that be

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working on a project working with a client working with team members.

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I watched you two communicate and I thought it was awesome how you kind of got to okay

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let's get going.

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Because like face to face communicating like you can really like you can like tell what

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a person is like almost tell what a person is feeling over text you can get like a completely

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different idea of how they're interpreting it.

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Totally totally right.

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That's the next thing.

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I didn't mean that and then it's like you put it in all caps you know.

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So yeah that's really good advice.

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Thank you.

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Yeah thank you so much for your time here.

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Unfortunately it's done.

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We finished everything.

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Okay.

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See you bye.

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Thank you very much for having me.

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I love meeting you Henry and I hope to see you soon Maxwell.

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Bye.

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Bye bye.