Purification Field Application Specialist

Work Schedule

Standard (Mon-Fri)

Environmental Conditions

Office, Some degree of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) required (safety glasses, gowning, gloves, lab coat, ear plugs etc.), Various outside weather conditions

Job Description

As part of the Thermo Fisher Scientific team, you’ll discover meaningful work that makes a positive impact on a global scale. Join our colleagues in bringing our Mission to life every single day to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer. We provide our global teams with the resources needed to achieve individual career goals while helping to take science a step beyond by developing solutions for some of the world’s toughest challenges, like protecting the environment, making sure our food is safe or helping find cures for cancer.

DESCRIPTION:

We are seeking a Field Applications Scientist to provide technical support and training for our analytical and scientific solutions. In this role, you'll collaborate with sales teams and customers to deliver demonstrations, applications support, and training that enables research and innovation. You'll serve as a scientific advisor, helping customers optimize their workflows and maximize the value of their investments while contributing to our mission of making the world healthier, cleaner, and safer.

Working across multiple technology platforms, you'll provide comprehensive pre- and post-sales technical expertise, conduct product demonstrations, develop new applications, troubleshoot complex issues, and build relationships with customers. Your role will involve working with cross-functional teams including sales, marketing, R&D, and product management to ensure customer success and drive business growth through technical excellence.
Key Responsibilities

Customer Application & Scientific Support

• Act as the regional subject-matter expert for downstream protein purification and chromatography applications.
• Provide hands-on technical support to strategic biopharmaceutical customers during evaluation, development and implementation of purification solutions.
• Design and support resin screening, process-development and optimization studies using POROS and CaptureSelect technologies.
• Support purification of monoclonal antibodies, recombinant proteins, bispecific antibodies, vaccines and other emerging biological modalities.
• Troubleshoot customer purification challenges involving yield, purity, aggregate removal, host-cell protein clearance, DNA removal, process robustness and productivity.
• Provide guidance on chromatography process parameters including residence time, loading, dynamic binding capacity, buffer conditions, elution, regeneration and CIP.
• Support column packing, qualification, scale-up and transfer of processes from development to pilot and manufacturing scale.
• Support integration of chromatography with filtration, TFF/UFDF and other downstream unit operations where appropriate.

Strategic Customer Engagement

• Develop strong scientific relationships with process-development scientists, downstream-processing leaders, manufacturing teams and technical decision-makers at key accounts.
• Understand customer molecule pipelines, development programs and manufacturing strategies to identify opportunities for early technical engagement.
• Translate customer process challenges into technically differentiated Thermo Fisher solutions.
• Establish joint evaluation plans with customers and drive projects from initial technical discussion through successful product design-in.
• Provide sustained technical support for strategic programs through clinical development and commercial manufacturing.
• Serve as an escalation point for complex purification application issues within South Asia.

Commercial & Design-In Support

• Partner closely with sales, account management and business-development teams to support pre-sales and post-sales activities.
• Build and manage a technical design-in pipeline for purification products across strategic accounts.
• Identify new opportunities for POROS, Capture Select and related purification technologies within existing and emerging customer processes.
• Support technical positioning and differentiation against competitive chromatography technologies.
• Contribute scientific input to account plans, opportunity strategy and regional growth initiatives.
• Track technical evaluations, customer milestones, design-ins and conversion opportunities.
• Support achievement of regional purification revenue, design-in and strategic account objectives.

Technology Introduction & Market Development

• Champion new product introductions and emerging purification technologies across South Asia.
• Identify suitable lighthouse customers for early evaluations and collaborations.
• Generate regional application data, case studies and technical success stories where appropriate.
• Conduct seminars, workshops, webinars and customer training programs on chromatography and downstream processing.
• Represent Thermo Fisher Scientific at scientific conferences, industry meetings and technical forums.
• Monitor evolving downstream-processing trends and communicate market requirements to product management and R&D teams.

Bioprocess Design Center Support

• Utilize Thermo Fisher's Bioprocess Design Center capabilities to enable customer process-development, demonstration and training activities.
• Design and execute purification studies supporting customer projects and regional strategic initiatives.
• Collaborate with upstream, analytical, single-use and downstream application teams to demonstrate integrated bioprocessing workflows.
• Support customer visits, technical workshops and proof-of-concept studies at the Bioprocess Design Center.

Regional Technical Leadership

• Provide purification application leadership across South Asia and coordinate with APAC and global subject-matter experts.
• Mentor and technically support commercial and application colleagues on downstream-processing technologies.
• Develop standardized technical approaches, best practices and application workflows for strategic customer engagements.
• Lead technically complex, multi-site customer projects requiring coordination across commercial, product and application functions.
• Communicate customer needs, competitive intelligence and technology gaps to global product-management and R&D teams.
• Contribute to regional application strategy and annual operating plans for the purification business.

Education

• Master's degree or Ph.D. in Biochemistry, Biotechnology, Bioengineering, Chemical Engineering, Biology, Chemistry or a related discipline.
• Advanced scientific or engineering training in downstream bioprocessing is preferred.

Experience

•  7+ years of relevant experience in biopharmaceutical downstream process development, applications, manufacturing or technical support.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience developing purification processes for biologics.
• Prior customer-facing or field-application experience is strongly preferred.
• Experience working with biopharmaceutical process-development or manufacturing organizations is highly desirable.
• Experience supporting projects from laboratory development through scale-up or manufacturing is preferred.

Technical Knowledge & Skills

Strong practical understanding of:

• Protein chemistry and bioprocessing
• Affinity chromatography
• Protein A chromatography
• Ion-exchange chromatography — AEX and CEX
• Hydrophobic interaction chromatography
• Mixed-mode chromatography
• Size-exclusion chromatography
• Chromatography resin screening and selection
• Dynamic binding capacity and breakthrough studies
• Column packing and qualification
• Process scale-up
• Resin cleaning and CIP strategies
• Buffer preparation and process optimization
• High-throughput purification-development approaches

Experience with chromatography systems and process-development platforms is expected.

Knowledge of protein analytical techniques such as HPLC, SEC, electrophoresis/CGE, ELISA and related analytical tools is advantageous.

Leadership & Behavioral Competencies

• Strong scientific credibility and ability to engage senior technical customers.
• Demonstrated ability to independently solve complex application and process-development problems.
• Ability to influence customer decisions through scientific evidence and application expertise.
• Strong customer focus and commercial awareness.
• Ability to prioritize multiple strategic projects across different customers and geographies.
• Excellent scientific presentation, communication and training skills.
• Strong collaboration across sales, marketing, product management, R&D and regional/global application organizations.
• Comfortable operating in a matrix organization with limited direct supervision.
• Ability to convert customer needs into actionable technical and commercial opportunities.
• Strong ownership, execution discipline and follow-through.
  

Travel Requirements

The position requires frequent travel to customer sites (50-70%) across India and South Asia.