By Rebecca Smith
This year, our fiscal year kicked off with an extra special party – we combined our New Year’s bash with an Independence Day celebration, plus Mike Gottschalk let us roll out the red carpet and sparklers for a champagne toast to celebrate his retirement! Talk about a party – we had a circus theme for the event and several people came in costume!
Everyone had a great time and we sincerely wish Mike all the best of luck in his retirement – Mike, may you delight in spending time with your grandkids and still find plenty of hours for golf! Cheers and thank you for your many years of service!
The Pickering staff came back from the long holiday weekend recharged and ready for the start of the fiscal year! New hire Maureen was just hitting her 90-days at Pickering and we thought the excitement was winding down around the lab… That is, until we jumped headfirst into the deep-end of the hiring pool once more!
With Mike’s retirement fresh in our minds, we began our search for a new Customer Service Manager to join our team. We searched high, we searched low, we searched Indeed.
As a result, we’d now like to introduce you to Rudy Suez, the newest – scratch that, second newest – employee to join Pickering! Rudy joins us from his previous employer, where he managed the Inside Sales and Customer Service team that supported Veterinary Chemistry and Hematology customers for the last several years. For our team, Rudy will be managing our Customer Service team as well as looking for new ways to impact our sales and customer experiences.
When he has free time, Rudy enjoys hitting the gym on weeknights and road-tripping down to Disneyland whenever he can get away for a weekend. You might have already spoken with him on the phone over the last couple of weeks, but next time feel free to ask him about Space Mountain while placing your order!
Rudy got a chance to meet some of you at this year’s AOAC International conference and he can’t wait to continue building relationships with more of our customers. He’s still has plenty to learn but he’s friendly and enthusiastic, so don’t be shy to share a little bit about your company and post-column application of choice, if you have the time! Rudy would welcome contact via email or feel free to call him up and have a chat.
And finally, speaking of new employees, we’d also like to briefly introduce Yuliana Lopez, our brand-new admin-of-all-trades! Yuliana will be cross-training with Diana over the next several weeks and learning how to route your calls, take your orders, send your invoices and generally provide full-service customer support!
In her spare time, Yuliana enjoys watching anime, reading books and unleashing her creative genius on hair and makeup as a licensed cosmetologist! If you’d like to say hello and welcome her to the team, she can be reached by email or by walking through the Pickering front door! Otherwise, she can be reached along with Diana and Gloria at our orders@pickeringlabs.com email address!
The North American Chemical Residue Workshop (NACRW), formerly known as the Florida Pesticide Residue Workshop, was held in Naples, Florida. For the 56th consecutive year, laboratory professionals met to discuss the latest trends in the analysis of pesticides, veterinary drugs and other chemical residues. The big topics at this meeting were cannabis analysis, novel and emerging contaminants in drinking water and food matrices, and finally trends in veterinary drug residue control. Sareeta Nerkar and Maria Ofitserova both attended this year, representing Pickering Laboratories at our booth and in several key technical and vendor presentations.
Pickering Laboratories has developed a new post-column derivatization method to analyze cannabinoids in cannabis plants and cannabis-containing edible products. This post-column method is based on reaction with Fast Blue Salt reagent under basic conditions, a well-known color-forming reaction that is used in drug tests to detect cannabinoids via test-tube methods and thin-layer chromatography. After derivatization, detection at 475 nm is performed using a UV/Vis detector. The same post-column method was used for analyzing cannabinoids in hemp but with a modified sample preparation procedure that was easier and faster.
The United States 2018 Farm Bill changed the legal status of both domestic hemp cultivation and manufacturing of products that include parts or derivatives of hemp plants, including cannabidiol (CBD) derived from hemp. Moving forward, after obtaining the approval from the USDA, the individual States will assume primary regulatory authority over the hemp industry. The States need to present their plans for regulating hemp industry and otherwise be subject to USDA regulations. Unfortunately, there are several issues causing delays with release of standardized rules, the main problem being the absence of Federal delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) testing standards. Testing for the presence of THC is necessary to distinguish hemp from marijuana.
Pickering Labs would like to congratulate all of our winners for our previous newsletter’s I’m not seeing any peaks! Carbamates edition Quiz: Jim Balk from Nebraska Public Health Environmental Lab, Josiah Hakala from Minnesota Department of Health, Narjes Ghafoori from LA County Environmental Toxicology Lab, Tom Schneider from Suffolk County Water Authority, and Jiufeng Fan from Glaxo Smith Kline.
Two of our research chemists will be traveling to Naples, Florida from July 21-24, and they hope to get a chance to meet customers face-to-face and compare notes on the latest research and upcoming industry needs! Sareeta Nerkar will be joined by Maria Ofitserova in representing Pickering Laboratories at the meeting. In addition to sponsoring a luncheon, Sareeta and Maria will be hosting a vendor seminar on Wednesday, July 24 that will include the latest post-column applications, including Mycotoxins Analysis in Hemp and additional exciting news.