Spectral Engines provides training places and opportunities also for students. We are constantly looking for new talents for example in the fields of engineering, marketing and software development. Anette Pakarinen is one of those who ended up to Spectral Engines as a trainee almost an year ago. She is a 24-year-old Laboratory Analyst student and she did her job internship in Spectral Engines as a part of her studies. The first internship in a laboratory analyst's studies usually takes place during the second year of studies. Anette was promoted as Application Specialist just recently and she started working full-time in August 2017.
Automated measurement station reduces the development time dramatically
Spectral Engines has put effort on rapid application development to speed up the development of new applications significantly. Automated laboratory scanner station plays critical role in the application development to get all possible variations from sample interface to be implemented into calibration model. Anette has been involved in developing and testing automated application development tools in several pilot cases. This work creates the foundation of the NIRONE scanner platform algorithm development which is also crucial part of Spectral Engines offering in the near future.
One of the most memorable projects for Anette was to participate Spectral Engines’s Food Scanner food library development. She measured most of the food samples for the EU Horizon Prize Food Scanner contest, and the process sometimes included even cooking. The library required more than 10 000 measurements from 500 different food ingredients. An essential part of this development work was also an analysis and the evaluation of the quality of the measured spectra. Thanks to much of Anette’s work, Spectral Engines’ lab software is very convenient to use and it is coupled to Spectral Engines’ cloud platform. This gives easy access to algorithm developers to the data which they can rely on.
Laboratory analyst’s work involves international collaboration and multi-disciplinary skills
Anette says that she went to the job interview with a positive "I want this job”-attitude. “Immediately in the first week I noticed that the work community was great and I was even able to get my hands dirty, I made some ethanol and glucose measurements. There was no reason to fear that I did not know or learn anything because the introduction was brilliant.”
Laboratory Analyst’s work requires also collaboration with international research laboratories. In some cases customers or partners are not able send their samples or it is more convenient to make measurement campaign together with them in their laboratory. The highlight, so far, has been a trip to Florida where Anette visited in our partner laboratory and did a measurement campaign in May. The results were sent to Spectral Engines’s cloud platform from the laboratory and the initiative calibration models were created in Finland already when Anette was still in Florida!
Anette feels that her work is versatile, she can also participate in product development, for example by testing the software. She says that after being one year at Spectral Engines, she is now sure that she is in the right industry. “I recommend Spectral Engines as an internship and workplace, we have many opportunities for new talents,” adds Anette.
