Michael J. Williams received his MSc in organic chemistry from the University of Oregon in 1995. Immediately after school he worked in the pharma industry doing process development and scale-up. In 1998, Mike became a production chemist at a small surfactant company called Tomah Products in Milton, WI. Since then, he has been a synthetic research chemist, group leader and senior group leader. After several corporate name changes, Mike still sits at the same desk, but he works for the Evonik Corporation where he now manages two synthetic and one analytical R&D groups. He is additionally responsible for scale-up and product transfer activities at five production sites in the Americas.