Kelly Wilczynski, Brian Karns and Mike
Cipoletti
Hello, my name is Brian Karns, and I graduated from Waynesburg University in 2016 with my BS in Forensic Science and again in 2017 with my MA in Criminal Investigation. While at Waynesburg, I was a TA for General Chemistry as well as Intro to Forensic Science. I also worked in the stock room with Kelly. Getting to experience how others learn, and the hands-on experience between work and class provided me with an amazing foundation to build my career. I have many fond memories from my time in school, getting to create ballistic gel molds and collecting bullets for my research, going to the ACS convention in San Diego and the IAI convention to present my poster, and spending half a semester troubleshooting and trying to get the old AA to work in Dr. Davis’s Instrumentation class.
Waynesburg provides a broad range of courses that can allow you to get a foot into many different aspects of the STEM workforce, and you have many instructors with respected voices in those communities."
Initially, out of school I began working as a Quality Control Chemist at Mylan Pharmaceuticals and was able to expand on my wet chemistry practices and begin to move towards High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC). I worked there while finishing my Masters program before taking a lateral move to a Forensic Toxicology position at Aegis Sciences Corporation in Nashville, TN. There, I was exposed to extraction techniques with different biological mediums and moved to HPLC Mass Spectrometry. When a new opportunity within the company opened within their Laboratory Engineering department, I quickly jumped into that position and catapulted into my current position as a Senior Field Service Engineer with Agilent Technologies back in the Pittsburgh area. I now get to help different universities, hospitals, and chemical companies by servicing their instrumentation and teaching them the uses of them.
The Waynesburg Forensic and Chemistry programs both helped prepare me for my career, but not how I thought they would as I was going through them. I had pictured myself as a crime scene analyst or forensic scientist, but through my career I’ve realized that while I still want to help people, it can be done in different ways. Waynesburg provides a broad range of courses that can allow you to get a foot into many different aspects of the STEM workforce, and you have many instructors with respected voices in those communities. What you plan on doing while in school can very likely be different from where you end up, but you should always be open to new opportunities within fields that interest you.
Department of Chemistry and Forensic Science
Waynesburg University sets itself apart with $1M in new, cutting-edge chemistry and forensic science equipment routinely used in professional labs, providing students with unmatched hands-on learning rarely found at similar institutions.
