Houston opening goes with a swing…

As President of the Americas Operation for Malvern Instruments, it was my great pleasure on 19 March to welcome a whole host of people to the celebrations that marked the opening of our new multi-purpose facility in Houston, Texas. While the weather outside may have been stormy, the atmosphere and mood inside the building couldn’t have been warmer as we declared this first-class facility open and welcomed Malvern’s Houston team to their new home, helped along by the superb Mariachi Band you see in the photo – pictured with some of our guests.

Opening the doors

Not only were all our Houston employees and their families present, we were joined by Paul Walker, Malvern’s Managing Director, and Simon McCaskie, Operations Director, and were able to thank in person the contractors who have made the fit-out of this new site such a tremendous success. A special mention here too for Peter Bennett, Project Manager for the move to the new Houston facility, and Terry Oglethorpe, who is our Operations Manager there – for them, as everyone else, the opening is the culmination of a year of hard work to pull everything together – and what a great job they all did.

Center of Excellence

As well as providing applications development and demonstration facilities for all Malvern systems, the new site will be a Center of Excellence for Malvern’s separations products and we were delighted to have with us for the day Max Haney, the founder of Viscotek Corporation, acquired by Malvern in 2008. At 22,000 sq. ft. the new building is double the size of Malvern’s previous premises in Houston and houses state-of-the-art laboratories, product development, manufacturing and commercial operations.

Buoyed by a comment from one of our visitors that “this is one of the best facilities I’ve ever been in” I can’t wait to welcome more people to Houston. The new applications laboratories are particularly exciting because not only will we showcase our complete line of chromatography systems, we’ll also feature Malvern’s entire product offering of particle characterization and imaging systems, along with our rheometers. We can now be even more responsive to our expanding customer base in the United States, as well as some of the emerging markets in Latin America. I also look forward to seeing the state-of-the-art training facilities in action for seminars, user forums, schools, workshops and other training sessions. I really hope everyone will take full advantage of what Malvern has to offer here.

Thanks again

Once again, I’d like to thank everyone who has been in any way involved in the development of this new facility – and to our customers, we can’t wait to see you there!