PerkinElmer presented the awards at the 33rd International Symposium on Capillary Chromatography (ISCC) in Portland, Oregon. ’Recognizing the work of accomplished chromatographers and young leaders in the field is important in ensuring that we encourage new developments in capillary chromatography,’ said Eric Ziegler, vice president chromatography business unit, PerkinElmer. ’We must continue to work closely with our fellow scientists in academia to partner on solutions that meet the needs of both industry and academia.’
The Marcel Golay Award Committee, chaired by Professor Milos Novotny of Indiana University, presented the 2009 award to Dr Barry Karger, director of the Barnett Institute and professor of Analytical Chemistry at Northeastern University. Dr Karger was recognized for a lifetime of achievement in capillary chromatography, including 315 reviewed publications and 39 patents. Dr Karger recently broke new ground by using 10 mm inside diameter (ID) porous layer open tubular (PLOT) columns to analyze samples with fewer than 10,000 cells. Compared to the traditional 75 µm ID column, the PLOT platform delivers high sensitivity using less than one-fifth of the sample amount. The small sample requirement enables multiple injections into the column for increased protein identification.
The Leslie Ettre Award was presented to W. Christopher Siegler, a graduate student at the University of Washington, for his paper focused on the addition of a third GC dimensional separation to separate overlapped analytes. The instrument, which Mr. Siegler and other University of Washington researchers developed, is simple and requires only minor modifications to a conventional 1D gas chromatograph with a low cost (approximately $1000). It provides unique separation capability by utilizing three columns with different chemical selectivity to distinguish analytes from complex samples. The researchers used the parallel factor analysis method to mathematically analyze the peaks to obtain the chromatogram in each dimension.
The Marcel Golay Award is in honor of PerkinElmer’s former employee, Marcel Golay, who invented the capillary column for gas chromatography (GC). The award was instituted in 1989 and is presented each year at the International Symposium on Capillary Chromatography. The Leslie Ettre Award is in honour of Leslie S. Ettre, who worked at PerkinElmer for 32 years and made major contributions to gas chromatography (GC), including writing and editing more than 40 books and almost 400 articles and papers on capillary chromatography. The award is given each year at the International Symposium on Capillary Chromatography to a scientist 35 years old or younger who presented the most interesting original research in capillary GC with an emphasis on environmental and food safety.