Where in the world is Cyrus?

Sorry I dissappeared for a while. First there was the end of the semester with finals and all of the projects we do at KGI coming due. Then I started my summer internship. I ended up working at Genentech down in Oceanside, CA (Northern San Diego County). Now you might be asking yourself, “What the heck is Cyrus doing working at a pharma biotech company?!” Well, in looking around for internships, I realized that a lot of the opportunities in the small biofuel type startups were lab related (for the scientists). I have always considered myself an engineer and my primary interest is in large scale manufacturing. Not just what bugs to grow or the theory of fermentation or bioseperations but how do you actually run a large plant? What are the systems needed and how are every day operations managed? So when I saw an opportunity to work in the state of the art manufacturing plant of the original biotech company, I jumped at the chance. I am doing a project in data management and automation of the plant which means I get a good overview of all the systems running in the plant. In fact I can see the status in real time of all 18,000+ sensors, valves, pumps, etc in the plant and also see what they have done since the place opened. So one thing I will have a good grasp on is how you put one of these $700 million dollar plants together and that is something that all those biofuel startups will need to know when the time comes to build their plants. Besides, Genentech is a pretty cool company. It’s probably one of the only traditional medicinal biotech companies I would consider working for long term. Plus, you get tons of free food!
Stay tuned for updates. In mid August, I will be attending the annual meeting of the Society for Industrial Microbiology wich is going to have all sorts of cool workshops and talks on metabolic engineering, biofuels, and even bionanotechnology systems. There is even a couple of talks on CHO cell culture by KGI’s very own Matt Croughan. I plan on providing full coverage of cool stuff I run across there.