Dr. Nazmul Alam

I grew up in Bangladesh and completed my undergraduate training in chemistry before a UNESCO research fellowship took me to the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Graduate work followed at Western University, then a Ph.D. at the University of Waterloo in the lab of Prof. Janusz Pawliszyn, the inventor of solid-phase microextraction (SPME) and one of the most cited analytical chemists of the last forty years.

After my Ph.D. I moved through several industry roles: method development for natural health products, high-resolution Waters Q-TOF mass spectrometry for environmental contaminant analysis at the Ontario Ministry of Environment, FDA bioequivalence work, and bioanalytical method development at a contract research organization. Then I worked at a cosmetic company, where I led LC-MS/MS and HPLC method development for cosmetic active ingredients in a cGMP environment.

That path across four sectors shaped how I teach. Most analytical chemists spend their career inside one industry. I learned what is genuinely universal (the troubleshooting logic, the documentation standards, the relationship between method development and regulatory expectation) and what is sector-specific. That distinction is the core of everything I teach.

Today I work with labs that need method development, troubleshooting, or validation support, and I train their analysts on their own instruments. I also run workshops for chemists at two stages: students and early-career chemists figuring out how industry works, and working analysts who want a better troubleshooting framework.

I also run Chromkit, a separate business supplying chromatography consumables to Canadian labs. It has its own site on purpose. Method advice is worth less when the person giving it earns on the part you buy afterwards. So the two stay separate, and if something I recommend here is also something Chromkit sells, I'll tell you.

18 peer-reviewed papers. 1,900+ citations. h-index 19. 200+ scientists trained. I still do bench work, which matters: the workshops and consulting are grounded in what actually happens in the lab.