Göstaberglingsvägen 37
69134
Karlskoga
Sweden / Telephone:
+46 73 6500 404
Ewan Murdoch
Nationality: UK and New Zealand
Age: 30
My Professional Goals and Ambitions
My professional goals and ambitions are a subset of my general goals and ambitions, which is to have a good lifestyle. That is, the whole life equation of work, free time, friends, family and play should be complete. So, while work is important to me, it is equally important that the environment outside of work allows me to thrive. So what I am looking for now, is an enjoyable and challenging job which also allows the other aspects of life to fall into place.
Aspects of work that interest me the most
I’ve always been an inventive and creative person and this is reflected in my work. Therefore, process optimisation and production capacity increases are my strong points. This ranges from improving process yields and reducing production cycle-time and downtime, to reducing operator workload and costs.
I also like working with people and the more variety in people the better. Therefore, I would like to get more involved with project management than I have been in my current position.
Professional experience
October 2000 to present date
Employer: Cambrex Karlskoga
Location: Karlskoga, Sweden
Position: Process engineer
Cambrex Karlskoga (part of Cambrex, an American owned life sciences company) manufactures a wide variety of PI and API for both large and small pharmaceutical companies. All aspects of drug development and manufacturing are covered and I have experience in such projects as one-off single batch pilot scale projects up to regular production in full-scale plants in batch sizes ranging from 20 kg to 20 Mtons. These cover the regulatory span from fine chemicals to cGMP conditions.
At my position as a process engineer at a GMP production plant, I am in charge of overseeing production of several regular product APIs, which includes production optimisation, troubleshooting and documentation. I also manage production projects of single production campaigns in both pilot and full scale. My position requires a lot of co-operation with others, from the marketing and salespeople who get the projects, to the chemists who develop the synthetic routes, the plant managers and operators who will be on the production floor and QA who ensure GMP and regulatory compliance. If the process is outside the capabilities of our production lines, I have the plant modified with the help of outside contractors.
January 2000 – May 2000
Employer: Peter Walker consultants
Location: Auckland, New Zealand
Position: Process engineer
I was briefly employed at Peter Walker consultants consulting in the water purification industry. I left of my own accord due to lack of work.
Academic record
1996 – 1998
Institution: University of Canterbury,
Location: Christchurch, New Zealand
Degree: BE. Hons. Chemical and Process engineering
Grade: 2nd class, 1st degree honours
Due to my high grades from Swedish high school, I was permitted to skip the first year of university, which allowed me to complete the degree in three years as opposed to the usual four. I originally wanted to be an organic chemist, but job prospects for engineers was better, so I chose that instead. I’m pretty happy with that decision.
Up to 1994
Institution:Swedish education system
Location:Nyköping, Sweden
Graduated:Technical line, a high school with a focus on science.
Grade: 4.1 on a 1 to 5 scale. 3.0 is average
I achieved the top grade (5) in all science subjects. This allowed me to skip the first year of university when I applied in New Zealand. (Note that in Sweden, you generally stay in High school until you are 19 years old. I mention this just in case you suspected I had to repeat a year.)
But what about those missing years?
1999
Occupation:Odd engineering related jobs
Location: Christchurch and Wellington New Zealand
I spent this year looking for work and doing odd jobs along the way. The longest job which lasted two months was a project investigating waste heat recovery from shower water.
1995
Occupation:Odd jobs
Location: Christchurch, New Zealand
Fresh out of high school and I didn’t want to go back and I had a variety of odd jobs. The most memorable one was door-to-door sales of cookbooks and children’s books. I figured that there wasn’t much of a future in this line of work so I ended up going to University.
Hobbies and interests
As I mentioned before, I’m creative, so most of my hobbies revolve around that. I play the electric guitar and compose and record music. I sometime play with others when I find like minded people though I haven’t focused on that for some time. I also write and draw/paint.
Most of these pursuits are fairly solitary though, so I balance things out with social physical activity and I’ll play whatever my friends are playing. Right now, that’s Badminton and Volleyball, but in New Zealand it was Rock and Roll dancing.
I try to keep myself in good shape so I work out on a semi-regular basis. It’s regular unless something more fun comes along.
My Background
I came from a mixed background of Scottish, Swedish and New Zealand. My Father is a Scot, my mother is a Swede and I was brought up in New Zealand with brother and sister until my mother got sick of the place and brought us all back to Sweden. Since then I have travelled back and forth between Sweden and New Zealand, though I have been living in Sweden for the past five years and am unlikely to return there for the foreseeable future. Sweden’s membership in the EU means I can get by quite nicely with my UK citizenship.