Chemist of the Month

   

 

Dr Paul Pui

Paul Pui is the Chemist of the Month for August 2021.  He is now semi-retired, having spent his long career as an industrial chemist and as a business manager.  Paul is now working part-time at SGS as a senior consultant to the chemical industries.  He demonstrates how, irrespective of one’s background, one can always find opportunities to help in career progression, whether it is within an employment area or with a professional organisation such as RACI.  Nowadays, he balances his work with his family life and hobby of vintage cars.

 

Interview conducted by William Li.

 

WL:  You’ve obviously been around with RACI for a long time, so how many years have you been a member for?

 

PP:  I wasn’t aware until very recently, when I received a congratulatory email for being with RACI for 25 years!  I became involved with RACI because of my job as a Technology Steward, which was one of the highest-ranking analytical chemist positions in ICI Australia & New Zealand, a large global company at the time.  In that job, I also served as the Chief Chemist at the ICI manufacturing site in Botany, which was the largest petrochemical complex in the country, now renamed as Botany Industrial Park.  I was a bit timid at the start in being involved with RACI because I perceived it as being dominated by high-profile professors who had authority of some sort, and there I was being a ‘Mr. Nobody’.  I found it to be quite wrong when I acquainted with more Mr. Nobodys within RACI!  In hindsight, those high-profile professors were actually not too different from myself!  They were just good at something.  I then started working closely with them and found ways to collaborate with each other.

 

WL:  And you’ve brought some high-profile people into RACI as well!  People like Danny (Wong) and Tania (Notaras).

 

PP:  Yes.  I encouraged them and also several others including the current Chair of the NSW Analytical and Environmental Chemistry Group (Kris Mobberley).  These people are self-starters and have great potential to contribute to RACI.  Obviously, they had an initial interest, and they just needed a bit of encouragement to get over the line.  To me, I’m glad these people are involved because a lot of them were quite shy and many had misunderstood RACI being an academic organisation.  People like Tania have an enormous amount of business and management experience in industry and has since brought more active members into the organisation.  And you also notice that it is not a requirement to have a PhD or have lots of titles to be part of RACI.

 

WL:  That’s also how I thought RACI was.  It looked like everyone within RACI was an established professional or an academic, and I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to pursue a career in chemistry!  After becoming a member, I always thought of ways to contribute, not just pay the membership fee and forget it.  

 

PP:  This is from my personal experience.  I used to be just a technical guy.  Then one day, I volunteered to do some work for my manager, who then encouraged me to further volunteer outside my role, which led to additional opportunities.  He then started inviting me to his management meetings, which facilitated my ascent up the corporate ladder to Chief Chemist.  The key thing is that opportunities don’t come to you - you need to start doing something to make it happen.

 

WL:  Yes, definitely.  So you’ve talked a lot about your career, how you found opportunities, your work travels and meeting the right people.  But what motivated your interest in wanting to be a scientist in general?

 

PP:  That’s an interesting question.  Let me put it this way.  I was a forestry student in my first year of university studies.  I worked during summer vacation in the Victorian bushland for a forestry research institute.  It was lonely physical work in a forest having to put up with flies, mosquitoes and creepy crawlies and not being used to living remotely after growing up in the city.  Then in my second year, after being told by a lecturer the need to identify at least 120 species of eucalyptus by looking at their leaves, seeds and flowers, and worst of all, remembering all their Latin names - that was really the nail in the coffin for my forestry course.  I then switched to general science.  I found chemistry to be the easiest of the lot, so I stuck to it and the rest is history!

 

WL:  Latin names can be hard to remember!  And to me, all those eucalyptus trees look the same!

 

PP:  Yes, all the plants looked the same to me too, and I was never any good at memorising names!  Also, looking back 40-50 years ago, I came from a family where everyone was in business of some kind, and I was viewed as a ‘black sheep’ in the family, given I was pursuing a career working with someone else.  I did struggle somewhat for a few years initially, whether I did the right thing.  But I had a successful career and managed to balance the family’s interests.  Clearly, talking to a businessperson is quite different from talking to a technical person due to contrasting interests, and I move frequently between the two worlds.  My upbringing could probably explain why I had been successful running a consultancy group in SGS for 15 years.

 

WL:  Okay, so we’ve talked about your early days, but what do you do now, being semi-retired?

 

PP:  Doing part-time consulting, which keeps me active and in contact with people whom I’ve worked with practically my whole life, particularly people from the Botany Industrial Park, some of whom are still working there.  At the same time, I work with younger people at SGS in using my experience and know-how to provide useful services to industries.

 

WL:  Keeping yourself active, that’s really good, because a) keeping contact with professionals that you worked with over the years, b) still contributing to the industry, and c) most importantly, making sure you’ve got enough money to live.

 

PP:  The chemistry and good people at work keep me going.  Money is not the key driver.  The industries I’ve been involved with have ranged from inorganic chemistry at one end to organic at the other end.  There are many chemists who do not like to play with things that we handled.  These include compressed gases (e.g. LPG) which are quite dangerous under high pressure, as well as compressed liquids like liquified chlorine.  There are always challenges to find ways to sample those things from process streams, as well as finding ways to remove impurities and return the gas to a state that would not trigger alarms around the plant.  Therefore, it is quite important to deal with safety issues, whether it’s the gas or chemical industry.  We also do a fair bit of interesting industrial forensics, finding out how and where a particular compound was made in a manufacturing process or in a product.  I work with a great team of professional chemists, who have advanced knowledge on chemical safety, chemical processes and chemical science.

 

WL:  Do you miss anything in your career?

 

PP:  When I stepped back from full-time work, what I missed most were the people; being able to talk chemistry with people who have the same interest - things that you spend your life talking to others about.

 

WL:  Definitely.  When you retire, those people aren’t around you anymore.

 

PP:  On the other hand, you’ve got to find something to replace that interest, so you make some sort of transition, so you don’t feel empty.  You need to plan and phase out slowly and find something that’ll occupy the free time you now have.  For me, I have grandchildren and vintage cars to play with, in addition to overseas travels.

 

WL:  What else do you like to do in your spare time?

 

PP:  I actually have less spare time than you think!  I’m the current President of the Austin 7 NSW Car Club and in 2017, I drove my 1929 Austin 7 across the Nullarbor Plain.  Before the COVID-19 outbreak, I did the same, from Alice Springs to Darwin.  It took 6-7 days.  Not bad for a car that’s almost 100 years old.  Quite an amazing trip.  My wonderful wife drove the support vehicle during the long trips.

 

WL:  Last question.  If there is one piece of advice to give to people who want to be like you, what would it be?

 

PP:  Only when you start to do something, you can figure out what you really like.  Do what you enjoy the most and make a living at the same time.  Because if you do what you enjoy, you can always excel in it.  Probably this is a very simple description of how I felt in my entire life.  Work has a connotation of having to slave yourself, so if you do something you enjoy, you never have to work!