Christie Leposa The Sherwin Williams Company Building Materials Group Leader
I am currently a Research & Development Group Leader for the Diversified Brands Division of The Sherwin Williams Company (SW). In this role I manage the Building Materials group of chemists that work on projects involving three business units of our company – White Lightening Caulks, KST & Uniflex Roof Coatings, and H&C Decorative Concrete Coatings. I started as a Research & Development Chemist at Sherwin Williams right after I graduated from John Carroll University (JCU). As a chemist, I worked in multiple Commercialization labs including Aerosol Chemical & Paint labs supporting SW brands such as Krylon and Duplicolor. I also was a chemist in the Building Materials lab that I currently manage. Research & Development projects for a SW chemist in a Commercialization lab can include new product development, product line maintenance, quality support and investigations, product line extensions such as matching a new color, raw material evaluations, developing or improving test methods, service requests, and competitive analyses.
I graduated from JCU in 2006 with a Bachelor of Science in both Chemistry and Biology. I am very proud to say that I graduated from JCU and thankful to have had such a rewarding experience while I was there. I am especially grateful to the Chemistry department for all that I learned from such knowledgeable and supportive professors. I feel they have prepared me for a role in Industry, not only chemically, but also how to be disciplined, and work as a team. A comment that always sticks with me came from a Director that works here at SW which was, “You JCU Chemistry graduates are like a big family, you all know of each other.”
Sherwin Williams values collaborative project work, whether it be with vendors, cross-divisionally, or within you own group. The JCU Chemistry department encourages students to have this level of team commitment by having group lab experiments and presentations, as well as group study or review sessions. The chemistry professors are also dedicated to making sure you understand main chemistry concepts and encourage you to ask questions and make comments. As a SW Chemist, this helped me to feel comfortable to ask questions to a supervisor or mentor. As a SW Group Leader, this has helped me to value employees’ opinions and to ensure they feel the line of communication is always open.
The lab courses at JCU are designed to make students very regimented in technical writing and involve hands-on instrumentation usage. This preparation has helped me at SW to write very detailed lab reports, meeting notes, email communications, and to keep a lab notebook up to par with SW protocol. The instrumentation training has accelerated my development to following standard test methods, using industry-level instrumentation, and understanding SW Analytical results or technical documentation. John Carroll also provides students the opportunity to be lab teaching assistants, which has prepared me to be a dedicated mentor to interns and co-ops, especially when developing them into full-time SW employees.
Overall, the JCU Chemistry Department experience that I found the most valuable was taking advantage of their undergraduate research program. I had the privilege of working under Dr. Michael Nichols on a research project that was published in 2007. This project taught me how to work with a mentor and independently to experiment a new mechanism. I presented my work not only to my JCU professors and peers, but also at other colleges, including Cleveland State University. In my years of SW experience, research as always been the most profound aspect of all my roles. At SW, presentation skills are very important, as all levels of the organization are expected to present new research concepts, technical results, and improved processes. Publishing my JCU work as driven me to submit patents on some of my new product development at SW. Through my research project, Dr. Nichols provided me with a strong research-oriented mentality which has helped me to proactively research new and innovative technologies in my career today.