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.

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.