Driving to Lower Levels of Detection

Russ Young:

There was one particular piece of math that was missing. I could not, for the life of me fathom how I was going to make this particular transformation. It's something I had been ruminating on for probably weeks, painfully so, to where you wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat because you don't know the answer yet. Well, one night I woke up in a cold sweat with the answer, jumped out of bed, wrote it down, and then got up the next morning and realized that it wasn't doggerel. It was actually the solution, and it now is utilized in the system that we have today, but it came out of a dream.

Stacey Flax:

Do you ever wonder how a simple dream could maybe lead to great technological breakthroughs? Well, we will hear a story about that from our guests today. Russ Young, chief Technology Officer here at Hach. Welcome to Testing the Waters. I'm your host, Stacey Flax. Russ.

Russ Young:

Stacey.

Stacey Flax:

How are you?

Russ Young:

I'm really good. Thank you.

Stacey Flax:

Good. Good to see you too. Thank you so much for coming on today. Let's talk a little bit about who is Russ Young, Chief Technology Officer here at Hach? Who are you?

Russ Young:

Who am I? Okay. First off, I'm what I call the head nerd of the company, and I'm blessed with the fact that I get to oversee the development of research projects at Hach Company. I actually am working with the lead scientists and lead engineers. We have everything up to and including distinguished scientists, principal scientists, senior scientists within the organization. I myself am a bioanalytical chemist and biophysicist. That's what my PhD is in. I went to school for chemistry and then moved into graduate school, and got my PhD as I just mentioned, at Colorado State University. Then I immediately after my post-doctoral fellowship in reproductive and immunological physiology, I did a stint in postdoc and then I came to Hach directly.

Stacey Flax:

Nice. Let's talk about the focus. You've talked about your career, your education. Let's talk a little bit about your career, where you got started, where your focuses were, and then also was there a point ever that you were maybe thinking about shifting your focus?

Russ Young:

In high school, I was fortunate enough to go to a high school that actually had an excellent science and math program. I'm a big proponent of STEM and it's partly because I had a excellent experience. I came out of high school with essentially a major in chemistry, a major in physics, and a major in math. We had multiple chemistry classes and multiple physics classes and biology. I came out of school with this great package from which to pick. Eventually, I would take all of them and put them all into one package. At first, when I went to college, I was going for physics. My university at the time, Alfred University in upstate New York, they really weren't equipped to move me along in the way that I needed to really make a splash in physics.

They did have a fine chemistry program, and so I actually had majors in both. I actually pursued a chemistry major in earnest with a biological minor, biology minor. Obviously the math, that was a component; that was necessary for both. I had made my first switch from physics to chemistry. Then when I went to graduate school, I actually was looking at the chemistry department at both CSU, Colorado State University and Syracuse University. Interestingly enough, both had very fine programs in bioanalytical chemistry. I was originally going to sign on the dotted line with a guy named Ben [Ware 00:04:40] at Syracuse, but then somebody pointed me at Colorado State University and a gentleman named Dr. B. George Barisas at CSU. Through a friend, I got an interview. I had an interview with him where they flew me out to the university, and I decided to sign on the dotted line with CSU because George was doing some outstanding stuff.

There was only one other individual who was in Germany who was doing the kind of work that Ben Ware and George were doing. George was really innovative and just my interest eyebrows went up when I got to know him. I signed on the dotted line with CSU, and now he's like another father to me. He and his wife, Deborah, who is a physiologist, they work together where George designs instrumentation and utilizes it for elucidation of biological function. Deborah, being a physiologist reproductive and endocrinological physiologist, also used the instrumentation. I did my PhD with George and Deborah. That's why I can say that my background is in bioanalytical chemistry and biophysics, because the biophysics component is the mathematical analysis that comes from all of that work.

Stacey Flax:

They really compliment one another?

Russ Young:

Oh, yes. They are a fine team.

Stacey Flax:

It sounds like your roots are really in academia in some ways, really.

Russ Young:

Anybody who's done a PhD plus post-doc, has an academic route, definitely. Making the decision ... at one point I thought it would be part of my journey to be associated with the university as a professor, and then I looked at how long it would take for me to really make a splash in the space. I really wanted to move into industry. However, in industry, I would probably have to shift gears significantly, which is okay. I don't mind shifting gears, but being able to carry my knowledge base somewhere where it was going to be utilized. Now, one other thing that when I was in graduate school, I was also the machinist for my laboratory. I did a lot of machining for my lab. When I finally signed with Hach Company, a gentleman named Joe [Parrish 00:07:13] hired me from Hach Company. Wonderful guy.

I came in and was able to do my own machining for my own instrumentation and things like that. It allowed me to move along very quickly in my research programming here, because I designed my own equipment, make my own equipment, test my own equipment, throw it all away and start again. It sped the research turns, if you will, to move the research programming a little bit quicker here at Hach Company, once I was finally moving well at Hach company, once I knew the ropes.

Stacey Flax:

You brought a lot of skill sets on board that really did help move you along. It's got to be also really rewarding to, as you said, build, utilize, breakdown, right?

Russ Young:

Yeah. Working in biology, chemistry, physics, biochem, microbiology, all at the same time, along with having design our own laser and optical instrumentation. I was blessed with the fact that I was able to practice an awful lot of fabulous mathematics and science. It's not my brilliance or anything like that, it's just that I was afforded the opportunity to play in multiple areas, which is a phenomenal gift that I was given. I tried to parlay that into a package that was attractive to business, and somewhat I think it was. I was able to move quickly through a lot of research here at Hach Company to move into a few pretty important pieces of work.

Stacey Flax:

We're going to talk about some of those.

Russ Young:

Sure.

Stacey Flax:

Tell me. Your first big project at Hach, there's a lot I know, but maybe one that centers around some of the LDO. We've talked on that, and then also for my sake as well, just explaining what that technology is.

Russ Young:

Okay. I'll go back before that. My first real project was the development of a algae sensing system for environmental water. It was at first based on fluorescence technology, because that was one of the best ways to go after ... when you measure algae, you're really measuring the chlorophyll and the ratio of different kinds of chlorophyll to tell you what kind of algae is there. Because I did a lot of fluorescence spectroscopy in graduate school, I wanted to bring that forward into Hach company for an industrial product. Unfortunately, going after fluorescence at that time really wasn't something that Hach company was ready to go after.

We actually translated into a spectro photometric analysis or colorimetric analysis. We can get into what the differences are between those two in a little bit here, but that was the first major project that I did at Hach Company. It had bits of fluorescence, it had bits of spectrophotometry, it had bits of chemistry development, and it was a quintessential Hach project, simplification of a complex method down to something that any customer can use. That's the idea behind Hach Company.

Stacey Flax:

It seems so simple because it is simple in the end, but there's a lot of work and a lot of research and development that goes behind that to make it possible.

Russ Young:

Absolutely. The brilliance of Clifford Hach, in addition to him being a phenomenal chemist, his ideas on simplification of process were quintessential. Those process improvements were quintessential to the success story of Hach Company. If you actually look at a laboratory prior to Clifford, just to do a hardness test, you would have beakers and burettes a whole bunch of chemistry equipment, probably a Bunsen burner and burners sitting somewhere else. The only thing that was missing was a Tesla coil with the Tesla ladder, with the electricity going up it. You needed all that equipment just to do a single test for hardness.

Clifford actually focused on, "How do I take that and make it so anybody who can read, or even better yet, anybody who can look at icons and follow the iconography to do the test, if I can develop something like that, I can really simplify the life of the customer at the wastewater facility, at the drinking water facility, or whoever wants to make these kinds of measurements." Clifford focused on that. The Hach 10 Commandments, that I'm sure that sometime in one of these podcasts we'll talk about, the basic elements of the Hach 10 Commandments is simplification of complex processes down to something that anyone can do. That's been a focus of my life and the lives of scientists, engineers, and innovators at Hach company. That's something that we just do.

Stacey Flax:

Again, I think it's evident that, not just evident, I think it's important to have that simplification because again, the technology and the science behind it is so complicated. The goal here is to make it easy, easy so that I could walk into a laboratory and just do the tests and it would be accurate; the results would be accurate. My lack of expertise didn't affect the results because the process was so clearly defined and so simple.

Russ Young:

If you look at the evolution of the Hach product, we went from all the beakers and all the stuff that I just mentioned to simple powder pillows where you just add some powder to a sample, do the Hach swirl with it, and then stick it into a device to read its color. That was still relatively handraulic. By Hach standards, if there's a way to simplify even beyond that, we should be pursuing it. When you look at the PPA project, the portable parallel analysis system that we have, where you take a chip, stick it in an instrument, touch it to a sample of water, and it does everything for you immediately in parallel. I could do four tests simultaneously. That is the apex of the simplification mechanism. Same chemistry's going on when I do all my [inaudible 00:14:05] and all that, but in a teeny, tiny package that is getting back to precision and accuracy. Anybody, a five year old child can get the proper answer with that particular product.

Stacey Flax:

It's like people who own pools. You want to be able to walk out, stick a test strip in the pool, see, "Hey, am I good? Do I need to add? Do I need to take away?," and having that simple, quick, because we're all busy. We've all got things that we need to be doing. Leaving the expertise and the science behind it to people you, just makes our lives so much easier.

Russ Young:

Certainly. That's our hope.

Stacey Flax:

I've heard that you have what you call this nerdy edge. Taking things to the nerdy edge, tell me a little bit about that.

Russ Young:

Well, I enjoy understanding things at a very deep level. I like to understand since we do wastewater Hach company, I like to understand why certain kinds of toilet paper are more absorbent than others, hydrophobicity levels of the fibers that are involved in toilet paper manufacture. That just means that you can actually take toilet paper and make it interesting from a scientific perspective. That to me, going to that nerdy edge is just fun. It's interesting, it's intensive. If you're with somebody who's into that kind of nerdy edge stuff, you can actually have some very deep conversations, scientific conversations, that begin to move down the path of very deep chemistry, physics, mathematics, on any topic. I enjoy that.

Stacey Flax:

Water's the lifeblood of our communities. That's why we do what we do, to protect water quality, global water quality.

Russ Young:

Absolutely.

Stacey Flax:

Science gives us this story that we can utilize to help plan.

Russ Young:

Yes, plan and respond.

Stacey Flax:

Plan and respond. I think that's so cool. You mentioned earlier in our conversation, fluorescence and colorimetry. I want to go back to that.

Russ Young:

Sure.

Stacey Flax:

I know that's something that I've seen a lot of it in some of the professional publications, a lot of articles about it. I'm curious, Russ, I'm curious to hear more about your role in that technology and also understanding what the different colorimetry, fluorescence, what they are and when we should use them.

Russ Young:

Okay. Hach has made two major forays into what I'm going to call luminescence based technologies. Luminescence covers things like fluorescence, covers things like phosphorescence, and covers things that are mathematically similar to both but not quite either. Our first foray using luminescence based technologies was in our creation of something called luminescent based dissolved oxygen determination. What is actually going on there is we have a little piece of plastic. It looks like a lens, probably about an inch diameter. We coat that with a layer of what I'm going to call paint, that has what's known as a [lumifore 00:17:32] in it. It's something that when I shine light of one color on it, it gives off light of a different color. As the concentration of oxygen in the air or in the water changes when it's in contact, when that disc is in contact with the water or the air, as the oxygen concentration changes, the amount of the other color changes.

I'm shining, in the case of LDO, luminescence-based dissolved oxygen Hach product, I shine blue light on the sensor; red light is given off. As the oxygen concentration increases, the amount of red light goes down. It's an inverse relationship physics reaction. We have developed the electronics and the math and the chemistry to produce a product that actually is widely used in wastewater determination of oxygen. What you may or may not know is that aeration or pumping oxygen into a wastewater pond at a wastewater facility, is one of the most expensive things that they do. Optimal management of that through measurement and control, is one of the most important things that you can do. This particular sensor is absolutely required to manage that oxygen relationship in a wastewater pond.

We developed that technology back in ... began working on it in 1997, and had a product I believe ... and I'm talking brainchild idea of a product out to something tangible in the hand, in about five years, I believe it was. That seems long, but in actuality, it was a brand new paradigm to Hach company, something we've never done before. It was exceedingly innovative back then. It's not particularly innovative now, because a lot of people do it.

Stacey Flax:

At the time.

Russ Young:

At the time, it was disruptive, breakthrough, whatever you want to call it. That was the first foray into luminescence based technologies at Hach company.

Stacey Flax:

The math behind that had to have been extraordinary. Tell me a little bit. I heard there was a dream.

Russ Young:

When we were developing LDO, getting signals out and the electronics and the hardware, they were challenging. Development of that was challenging. A number of fine engineers, fine scientists, worked on this project and really knocked it out of the park with respect to the device itself and the device architecture. Transforming those signals into a real oxygen value, was a challenge, extreme challenge. There was one particular piece of math that was missing, and I couldn't for the life ... and at that time I was a lead scientist on this. I could not, for the life of me, fathom how I was going to make this particular transformation. It's something I had been ruminating on for probably weeks, painfully so, to where you wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat because you don't know the answer yet.

Well, one night I woke up in a cold sweat with the answer, jumped out of bed, wrote it down, and then got up the next morning and realized that it wasn't doggerel; it was actually the solution, and it now is utilized in the system that we have today, but it came out of a dream.

Stacey Flax:

That's amazing.

Russ Young:

Well, it was quite scary because if I hadn't had that dream, we would've had to go some other route. I'm sure we would've found the answer, but it would've been a longer transition.

Stacey Flax:

Did you write down what you ate before you went to dinner?

Russ Young:

No.

Stacey Flax:

Or any of the things that happened prior to that? I could use that in some of my questions that I have. I need that Russ dream technology.

Russ Young:

It was multiple nights of fear and trembling, lots of discussions with other people. I'm not going to take full credit for this. I'm going to say that I had fabulous conversation with other engineers and scientists, but the final packaging and how to put it together came in a dream.

Stacey Flax:

So fascinating. The collaboration came together in a dream, and you had the answer.

Russ Young:

The weird part is that I have dreams like that. In colorimetry or spectrophotometry, what I'm doing is I'm ... It's what I'll call a 180 degree technology. [crosstalk 00:22:06] I'm going to shine ... yeah, yada, yada, yada. I'm going to shine a light into my eyeball, and then I'm going to put something in front of it that has a bit of color associated with it, and I'm going to tell you how much color is in that sample. What that means is I have an exceedingly intense beam of light coming at my eyeball. I'm looking at the sun, trying to tell you exactly how red a red filter is. Well, that's a great way to do chemistry, to ascertain the quantitation in chemistry, which is exactly what the Hach products, many of the Hach products do, brilliant science, but it has some limitations with respect to detection limit and management of the intensities of the light that are coming off.

If I have too much color in that sample, I won't see anything; It'll be completely black. If I have just a teeny tiny bit, how do I discern between the blinding bright light and the teeny tiny bit of color change that I'm going to have? It works within a range. Now, the wonderful thing about fluorescence based technologies applied in the same use model, is that fluorescence is classically, or luminescence, are classically considered 90 degree technologies, blah, blah, blah.

Let's take a look. Instead of looking at the beam coming straight at my eyeball, I'm going to shine the beam 90 degrees from where my eyeball is looking. I'm going to shine my beam into a sample and I'm going to look at what color or what light scatters back to my eyeball. Now, the difference between this and the colorimetric method, is that in a black room, I can have ... if I have any kind of event, a fluorescence event at my thumb, shining a beam this way, I'm going to see it this way.

Stacey Flax:

Coming towards you?

Russ Young:

Coming toward me at 90 degrees. I will see that, and it will have a very, very low background, as opposed to shining a sun beam at my eyeball and then trying to ... as I'm screaming for my retina being burned, actually trying to discern the color change. With fluorescence, shining a bright light. I never see the bright light, necessarily. If I'm doing a good job of fluorescence detection, I only see the emitted light from the sample. Now, what does that mean? Why would I care? Well, in generalized thinking about fluorescence versus spectrophotometric measurement, your detection limits go down. I have a very low detection limit with fluorometric methods as opposed to colorimetric or spectrophotometric methods. Hach company has really done a fabulous job of pushing the boundaries of spectrophotometry, but there is a floor. You can go solo and then you can't do anymore. Fluorescence takes you to the next level down.

Stacey Flax:

It's the basement. It's where you go down below,[crosstalk 00:25:20] even maybe the basement.

Russ Young:

Mm-hmm, and we don't know what the basement is for the kinds of measurements that we would do. With spectrophotometry, we are instrument bound. We push the instrument to the absolute apex of its performance. With fluorescence, we haven't even scratched the earth yet.

Stacey Flax:

We know the limits of spectro?

Russ Young:

Spectrophotometry.

Stacey Flax:

Photometry.

Russ Young:

Or colorimeter. Easier.

Stacey Flax:

Or colorimeter, but with fluorescence, we don't know what the bounds are yet?

Russ Young:

Well, excuse me. We don't know what our instrumental bounds are.

Stacey Flax:

Our instrumental bounds.

Russ Young:

How far Hach can push that. We have just started. We're now selling a new product that is for chlorine determination at ultra low levels. That's based on a fluorometric method that looks from a customer use model perspective, identical to our classical Hach simplified methods, where I pour some powder pillow into a sample, do the Hach swirl, and then stick it into an instrument and read it. Now, we're using spectrophotometry instead of spectrocolorimetry, or spectrophotometry.

Stacey Flax:

It really depends on what measurement you're wanting to do, what you're wanting to measure, at what level you're wanting to measure, with the science that you use, the technology. Tell me more about the chemistries.

Russ Young:

As I mentioned, the instrumentation is something that Hach does really well already. We knew that we could think about instrumentation and we could think about how to develop this kind of 90 degree technology, or acquire that technology. We knew that we could do that. The trick is making chemistries that resemble the use model of the current customer base with spectrophotometric chemistries, but making them work using fluorescence as the finish. I want to really herald the chemistry team here at Hach because in reality, some people aren't going to like this, but Hach is a chemistry company. We develop chemistry for water and we use instrumentation to look at that chemistry and how it changes with different analytes of interest in the water. The development of those chemistries is paramount to our success. The chemist here at Hach Company, led by a gentleman named Darren McFarlane, who is the director of chemistry, global director of chemistry for hot company.

He and his team have done a phenomenal job of thinking about, "Okay, we've seen the detection limit for spectrophotometry here. We know that we'd like to go lower now we need to develop some fluorometric assays that will go lower in these particular analytes, that I'm not going to tell you about because they're things that are in the works. The chlorine one is something that we did, and this is how it came about. Darren said, "I want to go lower," and so he had to develop chemistries that were based on fluorometric analysis.

Now, there are some intricacies with fluorometric analysis. You have to keep things in the dark so they don't get destroyed by the light. You have to work in a little bit different manner with respect to interferences. That team has done some phenomenal work in capturing all of the nuances of fluorometric chemistry while maintaining the performance in our classical use models. These chemistries have to work in the current use models and in the current samples that the customer needs to use them in. That is one of the most important pieces of the Hach success story, is we do phenomenal chemistry in whatever we do, and we simplify that chemistry down to the point where the customer doesn't even understand how complex it is.

Stacey Flax:

That's really cool. You're talking about pushing limits. Is there anything that you see coming in the future that you can talk about that you're excited about? Exciting new analytical methods? Any new fun?

Russ Young:

There are boatloads of fun things that we're working on that are disruptive to the space and will impact the market in a positive manner, and I would love to tell you all about them.

Stacey Flax:

But you can't.

Russ Young:

But I can't.

Stacey Flax:

Yeah. Trade secret, right?

Russ Young:

At this time, until it's a product, I cannot tell you, I cannot share.

Stacey Flax:

I'm telling you, the stuff that you've told me thus far and how the technology has changed and how Hach is continually pushing the limits and how scientists like you are thinking ahead and really looking to the future and saying, "Where do we need to be and what is it going to take to get us there?," and understanding, because you mentioned limits, and I know that parameters are changing for wastewater utilities, very rapidly. What would you tell someone? Would you tell someone who maybe is fresh out of college and they're interested in the water industry and they want to stay relevant, they want to continue down the path to being the next Russ Young?

Russ Young:

Well, this is going to sound antithetical to what you're probably expecting. The customer in reality doesn't want analytical methods. The customer wants solutions that make his or her life easier. They don't care. If the solution works, they don't care. Always, if I had the one piece of information to give somebody who's burgeoning technologist or innovator, generalized innovator, and that includes the marketing side, what would I tell them to do? Find out what the customer needs, or excuse me, find out what the customer thinks they need. Monitor their process closely. Learn what they do, learn what they complain about, learn what they think can't be done, and then do it. Give them solutions that help them with their problems that they haven't even thought they have, but in essence, in reality, they do have, they just didn't know there was a solution, right? It's all about gathering the proper insights from the customer's daily work, from the customer's buying habits, from the customer's problem set.

Then sitting down with innovators from all areas of the business, and some that aren't a part of the business, because adjacency is one of your best friends. Thinking about something in an adjacent manner, often leads to fabulous solutions. It's about orthogonal thinking at the end of the day, thinking off axis, about the problem that the customer has, being willing to step outside your normal solution paradigms, to go after the solution that nobody ever thought about because it can't be done.

Stacey Flax:

Breaking outside of that box. Taking what you've been told, like you said, can't happen and saying, "but how can it?"

Russ Young:

But how can it happen?

Stacey Flax:

"But how can it happen?" It also brings up, you were mentioning the simplicity, and there's a term that is used at Hach, Hach-ification.

Russ Young:

Absolutely, Hach-ificiation, providing the customer with a simple solution to their problem.

Stacey Flax:

That's awesome.

Russ Young:

That's what we do.

Stacey Flax:

Well, that's a very good point. I appreciate that. I think we hit on a lot of really important topics that people are talking about. We got to know you a little bit better. I look forward ... we talked about maybe talking about the Hach 10 Commandments.

Russ Young:

Absolutely.

Stacey Flax:

At some point. We learned how a dream dreamt a solution.

Russ Young:

Dreams come true.

Stacey Flax:

Dreams come true. Thank you so much. I appreciate you.

Russ Young:

Thank you.