Meet the NSW Group Chairs
July 2021
Matthew Wilkinson
Chair – NSW Industrial Chemistry Group
Matthew has held Technical, Operations and Quality leadership roles in a number of multinational companies in the food and chemical industries, including Goodman Fielder, Callington Haven, Ingredion Incorporated and most recently the Tassal Group. Matthew was site operations manager in 2020 during the closure of the Ingredion manufacturing facility in Sydney, and received the Ingredion APAC CEO Award for Leadership during this time. Matthew’s passion is best practice manufacturing and continuous improvement, and applying innovation and technology to integrate technical and quality functions into organisations to improve business performance. Matthew holds a BSc (Hons) and a PhD in organometallic chemistry from Sydney University.
Matthew has been a member of RACI since his student days, is an active member of the RACI Mentoring programme, and has been Chair of the NSW RACI Industrial Chemistry group since 2016. The aim of the Industrial Chemistry Group is to bring industry professionals together to build networks across diverse companies and sectors of the scientific community. Group networking events involve site visits to industrial or manufacturing sites, to broaden the awareness of the diversity of science in the industrial sector. A focus of the Industrial Chemistry Group is also the support of Early Career Chemists, to provide opportunities to identify career paths in chemical and scientific industry.
Matthew is a dedicated and proud husband and father to a family of five, and spends his spare time travelling (when not in COVID lockdown), playing sport and mountain biking. Over recent times Matthew has struggled to deal with an addiction to Zoom and Teams calls, and hopes to overcome this in the near future.
Scott Colbourne
Chair - NSW Pharmaceutical Science Group
Scott completed his B.Sc in Applied Chemistry in 1998 at Portsmouth University, England. His Scientific career started at BASF as a method development chemist analysing pesticide residues. This gave Scott experience in many analytical techniques including GC and HPLC with multiple detectors.
After 3 years, Scott took a career break to travel around the world for twelve months, including Thailand, Australia, New Zealand and the USA. A period of nine months was spent in Australia travelling all over in a 1985 Ford Falcon.
Back in the UK, Scott resumed his analytical chemistry career which moved to the pharmaceutical industry with Wyeth. A redundancy paid for a permanent move to Australia in 2008. However, on the way there was still time for some travelling in Canada and Southeast Asia.
Hitting Melbourne during the GFC was not ideal, but Scott was offered a role at Bureau Veritas Environmental as a validation chemist in late 2008. The year in Melbourne is where Scott’s management career started as the production manager for the water department. Then a transfer to Sydney followed to become the manager of a pharmaceutical laboratory. ALS quickly acquired the business and he has been there ever since.
In the last ten years at ALS, Scott has been the Quality Manager and Business Manager, including looking after the food business, which was acquired in 2012. Software has always been a passion of Scott’s and, in the last two years, he has changed role. Now in IT support services, he manages the implementation of ALS’s global customer engagement processes using Microsoft Dynamics.
In the RACI, Scott has been the chair of the NSW Pharmaceutical Science Group for the last few years. This group has been supporting the Pharmaceutical Industry for over 50 years, priding themselves on hosting relevant seminars and webinars. These events allow the industry to learn from subject matter experts and network with their peers.
Outside of work Scott has always enjoyed sport and exercise. He has completed the odd triathlon, but his passion is running, both competing in long distance events and volunteering at parkrun.