Eric Steindl – The Man behind the Data Pack

The Restek family was saddened by the recent passing of Eric Steindl. Most Restek customers never heard of Eric, but he played a major role in the development of Restek’s analytical reference standards. I first met Eric when we both worked at Supelco in the late 1980’s. He was the assistant manager of Supelco’s quality assurance group and I was an environmental product development chemist. I left Supelco in 1989 to join Restek and Eric left soon after to work for Lockheed Environmental in Las Vegas. I had the good fortune to meet up with Eric again in 1990 at an EPA meeting. He brought up the idea of Restek offering analytical reference materials to support the growing environmental testing industry. Eric understood the needs of environmental testing labs and combined with his background in quality assurance felt he could develop an offering of high quality analytical reference materials. A few months later Eric returned to central Pennsylvania to work for Restek. He spent the next several months tirelessly working on the development of environmental reference materials along with unique testing techniques to insure their quality. Eric was so proud of these products that he came up with the idea of sharing all the quality assurance documentation. This led to the birth of the Data Pack, which included all the information a customer needed to verify the quality of the standards they were purchasing. Due to Eric’s vision, Restek became the first company to offer this type of documentation, which is now common throughout the environmental reference material market. Long before ISO 9000 or ISO 17025, Eric knew that quality reference materials were the key to insuring that environmental labs produced accurate data. Eric’s pioneering work with environmental reference materials forever changed this industry. He will be missed by all that knew him, but his impact on the quality of environmental reference materials will continue to live on.