For Shannon Hall, being a part of Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc (Bio-Rad), the 65-year-old organisation that is engaged in the development and production of specialty chemicals used in biochemical, pharmaceutical, and other life science research applications, is both exciting and challenging. Speaking to BioSpectrum, Hall, the company's President of Life Science Group, shares her career lattice and career development as the company's President of Life Science Group.

How do you analyse your journey in Bio-Rad?

I took my professional stint in Bio-Rad with 2-year and 4-year achievable objectives. I joined the company thinking that I will work here while I prepare for graduate school. It is a good place to work and I was drawn to it as they encouraged me to use the technical support, saying that you can learn so many things and come to know of all the operations. When we were part of the technical support group, we were talking to customers every day. Most of the day goes by helping people and it feels good. And it kept me going. We had lots of new technologies coming up then such as HPLC, capillary electrophoresis, confocal microscopy.

So, my experience for those four years was like - We have a new technology, are you interested in this? It felt really fulfilling and I loved helping people all day long. I got a chance to do some teaching as well as I had to explain to customers how our product works. It took some talking for me to get into the product development group but my friends who had been a part of the technical support group thought this was a good thing to go ahead with. I was assigned the quantitative polymerase chain reaction (PCR) project in the late 90s and at that time it was a completely new technology. So I was very excited about that. I miss that routine of making people happy day to day but these projects take time and you can see where things are going.

We used to hover over the instrument for each and every data point initially. That was a very good experience. It went for 10 years with different products and projects. I had a chance to then join the protein group and worked with them for 4-5 years. Now it has been almost 25 years in Bio-Rad.

People you are working with are totally immersed in this stuff. And when you get enough customer feedback, it is all worth it.

Now I don't do product development myself anymore, there is a team dedicated to it. My most satisfying moments are talking to customers.