About Vitaly Kirkpatrick
Meet the SpectroScience instructor, an independent and vendor-neutral NIR consultant, and see how the lessons grow out of real client questions from labs.
- Electronics Engineering
- MBA
- Culinary arts, Valedictorian
- 10+ years in grain, dairy, feed and food plants
NIR technology expert with 10+ years of hands-on experience across food manufacturers, feed mills, grain facilities and dairy processors, and founder of SpectroScience.
What I do
I have spent over a decade working with quality teams at food and feed facilities: visiting plants, training lab professionals, troubleshooting calibrations that were not delivering accurate results, and helping people make better decisions with the NIR data they already had.
Across those years the same problems came up again and again: instruments installed but never properly validated, calibrations built on reference data nobody checked, and lab staff handed a machine with two days of vendor training and expected to make it work. SpectroScience exists to close that gap.
Background
My path to NIR was not a straight line. I studied Electronics Engineering, then earned an MBA, then, because food genuinely interests me, went through culinary arts training and graduated as Valedictorian. That combination turns out to be useful: I can follow the physics inside an instrument, understand the business case for deploying it, and speak the language of the people working with the food.
Over 10+ years I have worked across grain elevators, dairy plants, feed mills, oilseed processors and food manufacturing facilities. That means understanding how NIR fits into a real production workflow, not just what the spec sheet says.
Why I built this course
Vendor training costs thousands of dollars and is designed to sell you on their instruments. Formal courses are academic and do not connect theory to what happens in a real grain lab or dairy plant. Most of the good knowledge lives in the heads of experienced people and does not get shared.
This course is what I wish had existed when I was starting out: 32 structured lessons covering the physics, the calibration process, chemometrics and the practical judgment calls.