Peaks & Pioneers: Amandaa Brewer on Chromatography’s Coming Expertise Gap

Amandaa Brewer’s career didn’t move in a straight line from the lab bench to industry leadership. Her interest in analytical chemistry started with high-school chemistry class and hands-on undergraduate research, and she chose her PhD program at Florida State University specifically because her advisor prepared students for industry rather than academia. After graduating, she spent several years in application development and customer education at Tosoh Bioscience, teaching customers how to run and troubleshoot gel permeation chromatography (GPC), before moving into a more lab-based research role at Arkema, where she now leads the GPC lab analyzing the company’s polymer-based product lines.

Brewer is the second guest on Peaks & Pioneers: Women in Chromatography, a video series from LCGC International hosted by Daniela Held.

In the episode, Brewer contrasts academic and industrial research: academia allows deeper focus on a single problem, while industry demands faster answers and the judgment to know when a solution is sufficient to meet the immediate need. She also points to communication and networking, adapting explanations for different audiences and aligning analysis with what each submitter actually needs, as essential skills on the industry side. On career development, she discusses the adjustments she made during pregnancy and the importance of self-advocacy and finding both technical and soft-skills mentors.

Looking ahead, Brewer warns of a coming shortage of experts in large-molecule chromatography as experienced practitioners retire and fewer academic programs teach its fundamentals. She expects hyphenated techniques such as GPC-NMR and GPC-FTIR to play a larger role in characterizing increasingly complex polymers, and notes that despite the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital transformation in the field, chromatography software still requires manual interpretation and trained judgment.

Peaks & Pioneers continues with more conversations spotlighting the women shaping the future of chromatography and separation science. Watch Amandaa Brewer’s episode now.