Senior Scientist

The Company

The world’s leading supplier of mineral-based specialty solutions for industry with 14,000 employees, operations in more than 40 countries, and €4.3 billion in revenue in 2022.

Imerys delivers high-value-added, functional solutions to a great number of sectors, from processing industries to consumer goods. The Group draws on its understanding of applications, technological knowledge and expertise in material science to deliver solutions by beneficiating its mineral resources, synthetic minerals and formulations. Imerys’ solutions contribute essential properties to customers’ products and their performance, including heat resistance, hardness, conductivity, opacity, durability, purity, lightness, filtration, absorption and water repellency. Imerys is determined to develop responsibly, in particular by fostering the emergence of environmentally-friendly products and processes.If you want to grow your skills and develop your career, find out more at www.imerys.com

The Position

Senior Scientist

Job Summary

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 result