User:Ashlandchemist

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Username note: While I work for Ashland Inc. and I am proud of my company, I have not, and will not, engage in company promotion in keeping with Wikipedia username policy. kf

Hi! My name is Ken Forbes and I'm an analytical chemist and quality assurance laboratory manager. A 1960s Gilbert chemistry set changed my life. It put me on a path where wonder and beauty flurish, it fostered a respect for life and our physical universe..... but best of all, it set a career in motion.

I have managed the Quality Assurance Laboratory for Ashland in Northern California for the past 12 years. Prior to that I managed an air pollution testing laboratory in Los Angeles (Signal Hill-Long Beach) for 5 years, primarily involved with testing air emissions from refineries and heavy industries in the L.A. Basin and western United States.

I began my exploration of chemistry following a cell biology-physiology degree from University of California, Santa Barbara in 1984 and graduate laboratory training in clinical laboratory technology at the University of California, Irvine in Orange, CA. I also conducted research in mycology (Coccidioides immitis) at the V.A. Medical Center in Long Beach until 1990, using HPLC and other methods for antigen detection of Valley Fever disease.

My employer, Ashland Inc., is a major chemical manufacurer (# 5 in chemical revenues in the Fortune 500) and the 2nd largest distributor of chemicals in North America. Companies such as Du Pont, BASF and Dow Chemical may make more chemicals than Ashland, but unless you buy them via railcar you will probably get bulk chemicals from Ashland. The Northern California Ashland plant and my Quality Assurance Laboratory serve customers throughout western North America and the Far East. We distribute 100 million pounds + annually.... from 7000 gallon tanker loads to 1 gallon cans full.

I work in Fairfield, CA (San Francisco area) and I am a active member of the American Chemical Society (http://www.chemistry.org). I live in Woodland, CA with my wife Lori and daughter Stephanie. I enjoy live recordings of Grateful Dead via www.archive.org, collect vintage chemistry sets, am addicted to AM talk radio and own a partially-restored, dark-green, metallic-flake, 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham.

Thanks for reading.....and be bold, but accurate, in your wiki editing.

Ken Forbes last updated January 2008