Meet JC Tan!
JC is a Research Product Manager here at ADInstruments.
JC has been part of the ADInstruments team for the past 18 years, starting out as a Corporate Training and Support Application Scientist and eventually working his way up to Research Product Manager.
As a Research Product Manager, JC works with almost every other team at ADInstruments to support our research products. On any given day he’ll be: working on internal processes, maintaining relationships with our research product partners, investigating third-party products, identifying holes in our product offering, or fine-tuning existing products to improve usability.
“I like to solve things. I guess even as a child, I'd be very happy with a jigsaw puzzle or any kind of puzzle. I can just spend hours at it. So, on top of being able to help people by assisting them, you’re finding a solution that [researchers] can then use to produce a result that’s potentially going to benefit everyone, not just a select few. I find a lot of meaning in that.”
Prior to joining ADInstruments, JC completed his PhD in Cardiac Mechanics, investigating different models of cardiovascular disease.
“My grandmother suffers from hypertension, so I really wanted to know what is behind the whole heart and blood circulation system,” JC says, “I had to isolate single adult cardiomyocytes, and then I would stimulate those heart muscle cells and see how they were contracting. Because when you see a whole heart contracting, sometimes you can’t tease out problems with it because it's covered by the whole heart contracting, but potentially there could be a problem at the cellular level.
So, I would tease out those cells and I would look under a microscope. I would stimulate them and look at that contractile properties. I did that for about six or seven years. It was a long PhD, and that gave me a very strong foundation in understanding the scientific world and what other people were doing.”
At the end of his PhD, JC was discussing his future with his ADInstruments sales rep, unsure of whether to go on to a postdoc or go into the industry; she suggested he speak with her manager. After a short interview over coffee, JC was offered a position as a CTS Application Scientist, and the rest is history.
“When I came here… I think one thing that really stood out for me was that everyone was very kind and warm and welcoming, and it made me feel really at home. And I also like to find meaning in my job. I like to assist people. And the role that they offered was in support and it was not only to customers but also it was corporate support.”
His attention to detail and scientific background made him an ideal candidate for product management, taking the needs of customers and finding meaningful solutions, and his early experience with ADInstruments products gave him a sense of comfort that he was helping to support and sell products he truly believed in.
“After I finished my PhD I was working at ADInstruments and a lab called me back to complete another set, because they said they didn’t have anyone else who was skilled enough to do it,” JC says, “we worked out a deal with my manager at the time, and I took a PowerLab and LabChart into the experimental study. We had just released the Dose Response Module and it changed the entire experimental process. Before, this experiment would take me from morning until like 11pm, but I was finishing the experiment by 5pm; it was so much quicker… I remember I finished all of the analysis within half an hour, it completely changed the whole process.”
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