Q: You've developed products such as long-lasting lipstick CoverGirl Outlast and Pampers Sensitive Baby Wipes. But your PhD was on polymers. How did you get into the consumer products business?

I had always envisioned being a professor. But P&G was offering internships to PhDs, and I went for three months between doing my experiments and writing up my dissertation.

I didn't expect the depth of science in a company that made soap and baby diapers. Within a couple of months, I was hooked. There was this really deep challenge: doing basic science but also making things that people use all the time.

We do consumer research as well. With the same people, you can look at their hair under a microscope and talk to them about how it feels when they walk out of the house at 8am.

Then, as I grew and did the different things you could do as a scientist, I realised I wanted to be more of a manager, to take new scientists and talk to them about the serial innovation process and help them grow. It's been more fun than a person should be allowed to have.

Q: So what brought you to Singapore?

I've been here for 11/2 years now. We are opening a new technical centre - the Innovation Centre at Biopolis - and wanted somebody to help recruit the right people to work here, and work with the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) and local universities to promote more open innovation.

We've just signed a five-year agreement with A*Star to expand the number and types of projects we do. And one thing I started is a serial innovator camp at the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University. We bring our top 10 or 15 scientists, who've achieved the highest rank at P&G, and they spend two days sharing stories of projects they've done - not just their successes but also their failures and how they deal with them.

Singapore is so wired, so connected. I wonder where people will buy things in the future; time is so precious. Will they go to big grocery stores? Customise products? Products will have to be incredibly good to catch people's attention. Singapore is one of those places where you can already see the changes happening.

Q: What's a typical day like for you?

You start out thinking about how to build or formulate whatever product you're working on, and trying to get to the prototype fast enough that you can get it into someone's hands.

Then your afternoon becomes - somebody used it, what happened and why? What changes do you need to make? It's a cycle of build it, test it, evaluate what happens, and go back and do some more chemistry or physics.

Q: How did your daughters influence products that you came up with?

When I came up with sensitive baby wipes, I had a baby at the time, and I was kind of annoyed as a scientist, because when people made sensitive wipes, they would just be "no perfume". That's good, but what does it do for skin? The skin is pH 5.5 for a reason - it defends against enzymes and things that can irritate it. But in a diaper, it's not pH 5.5 any more because of things that are against the skin. So we made a wipe with a pH buffer that can keep skin at 5.5 over time. It wasn't super-complicated.

My daughter had a pH meter in her bedroom. I tested her skin every day for two years because I really wanted to know how it fluctuated.

Q: What's your biggest failure?

It was a failure of nature. My job was to supply all of the diaper materials to North America, but Hurricanes Katrina and Rita came back to back and disrupted our supply.

I learnt from that experience that you have to know what's important about every single one of your materials. When you have to substitute them with other things, any lapse of knowledge costs you time, and time on those kinds of machines costs you a lot of money.

Q: How does your love of ballet connect with your science?

I've been dancing since I was five. Ballet and science are similar: You're never as good as you want to be, and everybody brings his own thing. Also, with science, dance and serial innovation, the older I get, the more I have to push myself to do it.

You have to be grounded in your skill base, but also willing to take risks and live with uncertainty, otherwise the price of falling behind is going to be higher.

Q: Of the products you've worked on, which is your favourite?

One of the first products I worked on was a long-wearing lipstick that had to last eight hours, through two meals. My little team and I looked at every sort of polymer and colour.

At the time, there weren't a lot of women working there. To test the lipstick, we would offer free lunch, but you had to wear it through lunch. People signed up for the free lunch, but most of them were men.

We had to use really bright colours because we had to photograph and document the wear pattern. But there were times when it was so good that it wouldn't come off at all, so I had quite a few male scientists going home with it still on at night!

You're always a guinea pig when you work for P&G. I've definitely worn pretty much everything we make.

Q: How do people in this huge and fast-moving industry invent things time and again?

They have to be incredibly deep in their field, yet be broad and curious about the fields around them. At the same time, they're real systems thinkers. The good innovators do their process so that they're not satisfied with just finding a new molecule or material - they also think about how these things get made, how people use them, and so on.

Some people come from pretty unlikely backgrounds. One of our best baby-care innovators is a physicist, and he did a lot of work on groundwater and how that moves around. If you think about the core of a diaper, it's got to absorb something incredibly quickly - like the ground does when it rains - and drive it all the way down and hold it there. The same things are needed whether you're dealing with a baby or a rainstorm.

When you see people thinking like that, you know they're going to do well.

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