The Metrology of Leadership, Vol. 02 | Jennifer Krone

Are You Having Fun?

Jennifer Krone holds a PhD in Analytical Chemistry from Arizona State University, is a named inventor of several patents in mass spectrometry, and has spent over two decades building one of the most accomplished commercial careers in mass spectrometry. What sets her apart is not the titles or the tenure but her relentless commitment to sharing what she has learned, showing up as a mentor, and making sure the people coming up behind her get further, faster.

When she started her PhD at Arizona State University, she was deep inside mass spectrometry, working under a physical chemist on home-built instruments, obsessing over how to get ions into a system and what you could learn from them when you did.

The technology she and her team were developing caught the attention of a Swedish company, and Jennifer found herself spending weeks at their facility in Sweden, watching academic research collide with commercial ambition. The work culminated in several patents and serious acquisition interest from outside, but Jennifer and a small group from the lab had other ideas. Arizona State, in an unusual move, released the intellectual property directly to the team, and they spun out their own company, Intrinsic Bioprobes, Inc., taking the technology with them and commercialising it themselves. It was the first time Jennifer saw what science could become when it met the market.

When Jennifer’s husband, an Air Force officer, was relocated, she left Arizona and stepped away from academia for good. It was a turning point she had not entirely planned for. But what she had already discovered was that she was drawn to the commercial side, not in spite of her technical background but because of it. She knew instrumentation, she knew how to troubleshoot, and when her lab at Arizona State finally received its first commercial mass spectrometer, she found herself watching the sales rep as much as the instrument.

One sales rep in particular, named John Kerns, was unlike anyone she had encountered in science before. Where the academic world rewarded depth and isolation, John operated at the intersection of technical mastery and human connection. He knew the instruments inside out, but more than that, he knew his customers, he listened, he showed up, and he built relationships that lasted years. For a young scientist who had spent her career with her head down in the data, watching John work was a revelation.

“He was very knowledgeable but also very personable. Very supportive. And I just kind of got to know him over the years and was like, I would like to be like him.”

Years later, Jennifer ended up working for him. Full circle, in the most deliberate sense. What she took from John Kerns was not just a career path, but a question. Every time they speak, he asks her the same thing.

“Are you having fun?”

It sounds simple. It is simple. And that, Jennifer says, is the point. When the answer starts to feel complicated, that is the signal that something is off.

Know Which Balls Are Glass

Across twelve years at SCIEX, Jennifer built an excellent track record. Consistent President’s Club recognition, 180% to plan, and responsibility for a $25M key account portfolio spanning some of the biggest names in pharma and clinical diagnostics. The numbers tell part of the story. Jennifer will tell you the rest.

Success in technical sales at this level is not about working harder; it is about building a village. Jennifer surrounded herself with people she could call on in complex situations, internally across teams, externally across the Danaher Life Sciences portfolio after acquisition. When problems arose that no single company could solve alone, she brought the right people together. That infrastructure was her edge.

The instruments she was selling were not impulse purchases. Quarter-million dollars or more. Sales cycles of nine months to a year. In that environment, you do not take orders. You build pipelines, nurture them and carry opportunities through a long and technical process without losing sight of what is closest to closing.

This brings her to the most important lesson she learned.

“Some of the balls I was juggling were glass and some were rubber. The idea is to make sure you know which ones are the rubber ones, because you can drop them and they’ll bounce back. But don’t drop the glass ones.”

Know your pipeline. Know what can wait. Know what cannot. Just remember to stay close to your service team, because a customer whose instrument is running well is a customer who buys another one.

The Ceiling Nobody Names

Mass spectrometry is a technically brilliant field, and it is also a heavily male-dominated one, two realities that Jennifer Krone has spent 25 years navigating at the same time.

She gets asked, often, why she works. She is married to a surgeon, and the question, she notes, comes mostly from other women, which is what makes it sting the most, because it carries an assumption she has never accepted. She invested as much time in her education and her career as her husband did in his, working through a PhD, a Master’s, and decades of relentless focus on one of the most technically demanding commercial environments in science, and she loves every bit of it.

But Jennifer is clear-eyed about what women in this space are up against. The ceiling is real, and it is rarely named, and for a long time, she pushed through it on determination alone, without the tools to address it directly.

“I tended in my earlier career to get upset and leave and try something different rather than trying to figure out how to have that critical conversation while still in my current role.”

That is the lesson she now passes on, to stop running from the difficult conversation and start having it, to communicate and advocate for yourself clearly, calmly and without apology, a skill she openly admits she did not have when she was younger and one she now makes it her mission to teach. She mentors graduate students through the Females in Mass Spectrometry programme with a focus on communicating upward with supervisors and leadership, and gives her time to professionals inside her own organisation and beyond who simply need someone in their corner, because watching others find their footing and succeed is what motivates her now more than any personal target. She calls herself an enabler, and she means it as the highest possible compliment.

On the subject of balance, she is equally direct because communication is the thing that most high performers let slip first and the consequences, professionally and personally, have a habit of catching up. No career, however successful, runs well without the foundations outside of it being equally looked after. For Jennifer, those foundations include raising two successful children alongside a demanding career, competing as an Ironman triathlete, and treating exercise not as an optional extra but as a non-negotiable part of how she operates, whether that is crossing the finish line at the Boston Marathon, competing at USAT nationals, or getting back in the pool this afternoon with a shoulder still recovering from surgery.

“You have to put it on your calendar. It holds you accountable.”

It clears her head, feeds her competitive instinct, and is, like most of the best things in her life, a practice that simply requires showing up even when you do not feel like it.

Where Mass Spectrometry Goes Next

Jennifer has had a front row seat to this industry for over 25 years, and her perspective on where it is heading is shaped not just by the technology but by the customers she has spent her career serving across pharma, clinical diagnostics, academia and applied markets.

The established names, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Waters Corporation, Bruker, Agilent Technologies and SCIEX, remain the default for high-end analytical instrumentation, but the most interesting movement in the market is happening around them. Organisations like MOBILion Systems, Inc. are pushing ion mobility mass spectrometry into new territory, making complex biological separations faster and more reproducible. 908 Devices is taking mass spec out of the central lab entirely and into the field. Seer Bio is unlocking proteomics at a scale that simply was not possible a decade ago. The pace of innovation from smaller, more agile players is forcing the larger platforms to move faster than they are used to.

Jennifer points to two forces she has watched reshape the market from the inside. The first is environmental. PFAS compounds, the per-fluorinated chemicals now showing up in water supplies, food chains and human blood, have triggered a wave of regulatory pressure and litigation that has driven significant investment into detection and quantification capability, with mass spectrometry sitting at the centre of that effort. What makes it particularly compelling, as Jennifer described it, is the forensic dimension, where different manufacturers leave distinct chemical signatures in contaminated water, meaning mass spec can increasingly be used to trace contamination back to its precise source.

The second is biological. Proteomics, the field where Jennifer herself began, is finally maturing into the clinical promise it has been building toward for two decades, and single-cell analysis is moving from academic novelty into genuine diagnostic relevance. The CDMO sector, with organisations like Samsung Biologics, Lonza and ThermoFisher’s pharma services division investing heavily in analytical characterisation for biologics, ADCs and cell and gene therapies, is creating a new and significant commercial pull for the instrumentation world.

Jennifer put it simply. The data was always there. The instruments just had to catch up, and now that they have, the opportunity for the companies and the commercial leaders ready to move with it has never been greater.

Jessica Cohen

Jessica Cohen places executive talent across metrology, machine vision, and analytical instrumentation, across the U.S, at Metric. Passionate about building high performance teams and partnering with the most important companies in the industry, she has built a strong track record of placing leaders who have gone on to make a genuine and lasting impact at some of the biggest organizations in the metrology space.

Jessica is committed to spotlighting the right people and making sure they get seen. She champions women in what remains one of the most male-dominated fields in science and technology, believing that the industry is better when the leaders shaping it reflect the full breadth of the talent within it. The Metrology of Leadership was born from that conviction, a space to go beyond the transactional and shine a light on the exceptional leaders, and particularly the women, whose stories deserve a wider audience.

Each month Jessica sits down with one leader, goes deep on their career, their philosophy, and the hard-won lessons that have defined them, and shares it with the community that deserves to hear it.

If you are hiring, exploring, or know someone whose story deserves to be told, get in touch.