Dr Kathy Ridgway Joins the Anatune Team

Our application laboratory team does some really great work and as a result, demands on our lab grow all the time.

We regard the lab as being the engine-room of our business and we are pleased to take the opportunity to grow the team, whenever we find talented chemists who want to work for us.

In that context, I am pleased to welcome Dr Kathy Ridgeway to Anatune and to introduce her to you.

Kathy has over 20 year’s laboratory experience working in the food industry on trace residues and contaminants. She started her career doing pesticide residue analysis, before moving on to work on a wide range of food contaminants at Unilever. At Unilever she was a trace analyst, team leader and then contaminants expert, responsible for determining the suitability of analytical methodology for contaminants in foods. This also required a detailed knowledge of the occurrence and formation of chemical contaminants in foods (farm to fork) and setting up external collaborations with universities to develop cutting edge analytical techniques.

During this time, she completed a PhD at the University of Loughborough entitled ‘Determination of Trace Contaminants in Foods’. Her research focussed on alternative extraction techniques and in particular on stir bar sorptive extraction for the determination of taints and off flavours in foods.  Following over 10 years at Unilever, she worked as a technical specialist at Reading Scientific Services Limited (RSSL), in the investigative analysis department. At RSSL, her main area of work was in the determination of compounds responsible for food taints and off-flavours and understanding the origin of such compounds. She also worked on other investigative flavour projects and trace level contaminants using GC-MS and a variety of extraction techniques. As technical expert she was responsible for implementation of innovations in methodology in this area, both in terms of sample preparation, instrumentation and software for data analysis. Her role involved customer liaison including visits to customer sites.  During her career, she has worked to several quality systems including GLP, ISO 17025 (UKAS) and GMP.

She has published several papers including an extensive review of sample preparation techniques for determination of trace contaminants in foods and a review of the analysis and origins of taints and off flavours.  She has contributed to several book chapters, written magazine articles (LCGC and Food manufacturer) and presented her work at international conferences. This year, she was an invited speaker at Pittcon in Chicago. She has an extensive network of contacts in academia and the food industry.  She has achieved Chartered Chemist status and is an active member of the Royal Society of Chemistry as a member of the Food group committee.

Kathy has been a customer of both Anatune and GERSTEL for much of this time and has a great deal of practical knowledge about our products and their day-to-day use. Kathy joined us at the beginning of June and is already making a great contribution to the work that our lab is doing.