What type of applications are you involved in? One of the divisions of the company I work for is heavily involved in low temperature applications in the pharma industry.
sorry took so long to get back to you. I'm involved in a wide range of thermo applications. My formal educational background is in aqueous electrolyte thermo (solution properties and solution+solid equilibria). The range of chemical systems i deal with now seems to be unlimited (i.e. not just aqueous systems and not limited to hydrocarbons). Applications range from recovering refined or synthetic hydrocarbons from drilling mud, sensor development, cement reactions, scaling, corrosion.... Even did a little experimental and modeling work on actinide reactions in a high temperature, sour gas field after a neutron source was lost in a well (which happens with surprising and disturbing frequency). While I'm horribly ignorant of biochemistry my principal project at the moment involves various biomass to kerogen, bitumen, and oil transformations and exchange/complexing reactions (both self sourced and between rocks). It is only related to "algae-oil" in that it involves algae (and other creatures) on one end and oil on the other. Really cool stuff but oil company people and bacteria is a difficult combination 8^). If anybody knows a source of gram-ish quantities of metalloenzymes (e.g. hydrogenase, nitrogenase, SoD) for cheap please let me know. Cheapest stuff i've found is urease which is suboptimal.
