Richard C. King

As a child growing up in a farming community in north central Pennsylvania, chemicals were things used to strip paint, clean grease and kill weeds. Richard’s laboratory career started in high school when he and a friend were offered a few dollars to clean out and paint the basement of a small family run environmental laboratory. “Flame atomic absorption had to be the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Who doesn’t like flames that change color when you spray solution into them?  And you could make good money doing it!” he says. Two chemistry degrees, a successful pharmaceutical bioanalytical career, and 34 years later he is the co-founder of an analytical laboratory focused on quantitative analysis by LC-MS in support of pharmaceutical, biological, and medical research. The mechanisms of ion formation at atmospheric pressure and the consequences for quantitative analysis by mass spectrometry are his primary research interests. Over the next 30 years, he hopes to be a big part of improving the access to quantitative chemical information particularly quantitative analysis by mass spectrometry.