R&D Team Leader

Johnson Matthey (‘JM’) is a global leader in science that enables a cleaner and healthier world. With over 200 years of sustained commitment to innovation and technological breakthroughs, we improve the function, performance and safety of our customers’ products. Our science has a global impact in areas such as low emission transport, pharmaceuticals, chemical processing and making the most efficient use of the planet’s natural resources. Today more than 14,000 Johnson Matthey professionals collaborate with our network of customers and partners to make a real difference to the world around us.

Lead a team to design and develop new and established products for industrial homogeneous catalysis, with focus on new synthetic routes to ligands and homogeneous catalysts to improve scalability, robustness and safety of products, delivering proof of principle and technical transfer to on-site and off-site manufacturing facilities.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and promote JM culture of safety, sustainability and innovation.

• Manage schedule, deliverables and costs in all phases of research and development projects as assigned by R&D manager.

• Deliver high-quality hands-on experimentation and day to day management of PhD level scientists to deliver new processes and products to ambitious deadlines.

• Design and carry out experiments to develop new chemical routes to ligands and catalysts.

• Define specifications for new products (in coordination with product manager).

• Develop manufacturing processes suitable for safe and robust scale-up.

•  Lead process safety understanding in view of scale up. Supervise and develop relevant risk assessments and process chemistry evaluation.

• Support technical transfer to on-site and off-site manufacturing facilities.

• Preparation and review of scientific documentation.

•  Effectively communicate with team and with other functions (e.g. analysts, product manager, chemical engineers).

•  Lead team’s new product introduction process, through idea, evaluation and development stages.

•  Lead implementation of quality policies and meet regulatory standards.

•  To conduct work requiring independent judgment in the evaluation, selection, adaptation, and modification of standard techniques, processes, and criteria relating to the development of Industrial Catalysts.

•  To devise new approaches to problems encountered, working within conventional practices, but incorporating complex features.

•  Design and evaluation of homogeneous catalytic processes for the Pharmaceutical and Fine Chemical Market.

•  Maintain work areas in a clean, safe and tidy condition.

•  To carry out any other duties which are within the employee’s skills and abilities whenever reasonably instructed.

Are you the ideal candidate?

•  PhD in Chemistry

• 5 years of industrial R&D experience

• Profound scientific knowledge of catalysis and its industrial application

• Industrial experience in multi-step organic synthesis process development

• Independent user of standard organic chemistry analytical techniques

• Experience in homogeneous catalysis and catalyst development

• Ability to analyse and interpret complex technical information and make rational decisions

• Proficient in the use of IT programs such as Microsoft office applications desirable

•  Experience in organometallic chemistry, handling of air sensitive products desirable