Karen Esmonde-White

Karen has been a senior marketing and communications specialist at Kaiser Optical Systems since 2015. While at Kaiser, Karen initiated and has managed a social media marketing program spanning Twitter, LinkeIn, and Youtube. In addition to traditional print media (whitepapers, application notes, and journal articles), Karen wrote and produced several corporate videos.

Karen is also an Adjunct Research Investigator at the University of Michigan. Previously Karen was a post-doctoral fellow with Dr. Blake Roessler in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan.

Karen's academic work focused on basic science and clinical translation. Karen continues to advise in undergraduate research projects. One of her projects is the development of a nematode based model of how nicotine affects collagen development. Some of Karen's past mentee projects include detecting microplastics in fish tissues, understanding advanced glycation end products in cartilage, quantification of capsaicin in chiles, developing a laboratory model for bacterial biofilm formation on bone, and developing engineered tissue scaffolds for cartilage repair which maintain the chondrosite phenotype. For more details, see the list of Karen's publications and presentations.

After completing her masters degree in Chemistry, Karen had worked for Pfizer as a scientist. While there, Karen worked in a team developing a high throughput screen for physiochemical properties of API's (active pharmaceutical ingredients) including logP, pKa, and solubility. This high throughput screening method used robotic liquid handling to automate processing of dissolved API in multiwell plates for nephelometric assessment of solubility. Capillary electrophoresis were used for measuring logP and pKa, which reduced the solvent requirements as well allowing higher screening throughput. These were early examples of green chemistry and laboratory automation, where information was propagated for large numbers of compounds into laboratory information management systems.

In addition to academic and corporate scientific research, Karen has organized and chaired sessions at meetings, including the first Drop Deposition and Dynamics session at the 2010 FACSS conference. More recently, Karen was the program chair for the 2018 SciX Conference, held in Atlanta, Georgia. As the SciX 2018 program chair, Karen highlighted the need for analytical chemistry in microplastic research through a keynote lecture and two topical sessions.

As an independent consultant and expert witness, Karen has also provided support in litigation related to drug products, drug substances, and and pigments.

Karen can be reached via email at karen (at) esmonde-white (dot) com