The 2017 LCGC Awards A decade of LCGC awards has seen some of chromatography’s modern icons and rising stars honoured. In this 10th year of the award, we are pleased to honour two superb separation scientists: Pat Sandra, the winner of the 2017 Lifetime Achievement in Chromatography Award, and Deirdre Cabooter, the 2017 Emerging Leader in Chromatography. For the third consecutive year, the LCGC awards will be presented at an oral symposium held at Pittcon 2017. This year’s session, which were held on Monday 6 March, featured talks by both award winners and Milos Novotny of Indiana University, Jim Jorgenson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Gert Desmet of the Free University of Brussels (Vrije Universiteit Brussel). Photo Credit: Banana Republic Images/Shutterstock.com Pat Sandra Pat Sandra’s career has encompassed a wide spectrum of analytical techniques, blending the world of academia and private enterprise, and brought separation science into the mainstream consciousness. But more than anything, it has been dominated by analytical excellence, innovation, and a unique gift for problem solving. Pat Sandra graduated from Ghent University, Belgium, in 1967 with a B.Sc. in chemistry and in 1969 with a master’s degree in organic chemistry, and was immediately invited to join Professor Maurice Verzele’s laboratory to begin a Ph.D. thesis on the contribution of hops to the flavour of beer, a topic that had become controversial at the time in Belgium, where beer is an integral part of the culture. Unravelling the complexity of a beer extract required high-resolution techniques and this research led directly to Sandra’s early career focus in capillary gas chromatography (GC). Six years later, Sandra successfully defended his Ph.D. at Ghent University and just one year later he joined the Faculty of Sciences at Ghent University as an Assistant Professor. By 1985, however, Sandra was growing frustrated with the department’s reluctance to back him in broadening Ghent’s research field in separation sciences and to start investigations in supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) and capillary electrophoresis (CE). By 1st February 1986, Sandra quit the university. Inspired by entrepreneurs such as Rudolf Kaiser, Sandra started the Research Institute for Chromatography (RIC), surviving through teaching courses on GC and GC coupled to mass spectrometry (MS), as well as sponsorships from Carlo Erba and later from Hewlett-Packard. Two years after quitting the university, however, Sandra accepted an offer by the head of the department to return and become the new head of the separation science group. A fruitful collaboration on capillary GC then began between Sandra’s own RIC and Ghent’s separation science group. Splitting his time between the institute and his new responsibilities at the university, Sandra decided to focus the university department’s research on high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), CE, SFC, and hyphenated systems, and that work led to a number of advances. In 1991, Sandra accepted an invitation to be a visiting professor at Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands, teaching a course in environmental analysis. A further opportunity arrived in January 1998, when Sandra was appointed Professor in Analytical Chemistry at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. There, he established a centre of excellence in separation sciences and received the A1 status. For seven years he shuttled between Belgium and South Africa to fulfill his duties at the different universities and at the RIC. Sandra continued to make waves. He co-founded the Pfizer Analytical Research Centre at Ghent University in 2003, and became its director. He continued his links with South Africa where he became Extraordinary Professor at the University of Stellenbosch from 2006 to 2013. In 2013 he was invited by President Barroso of the European Community to become member of the Research Councel of the EU. Meanwhile, he continued to develop and expand his business. Following the success of the RIC in Belgium, Sandra founded a second facility in Lille, France, in 2001 to focus on method development, act as the exclusive distributor of Gerstel GmbH, as well as a value-added reseller (VAR) of Agilent Technologies. In — Lewis Botcherby -$r ($&VSPQF March 2017 126 Pat Sandra, 2017 Lifetime Achievement in Chromatography Deirdre, 2017 Emerging Leader in Chromatography
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The 2017 LCGC AwardsA decade of LCGC awards has seen some of chromatography’s modern icons and rising stars honoured. In this 10th year of the award, we are pleased to honour two superb separation scientists: Pat Sandra, the winner of the 2017 Lifetime Achievement in Chromatography Award, and Deirdre Cabooter, the 2017 Emerging Leader in Chromatography. For the third consecutive year, the LCGC awards will be presented at an oral symposium held at Pittcon 2017. This year’s session, which were held on Monday 6 March, featured talks by both award winners and Milos Novotny of Indiana University, Jim Jorgenson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Gert Desmet of the Free University of Brussels (Vrije Universiteit Brussel).
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Pat Sandra
Pat Sandra’s career has encompassed
a wide spectrum of analytical
techniques, blending the world of
academia and private enterprise, and
brought separation science into the
mainstream consciousness. But more
than anything, it has been dominated
by analytical excellence, innovation,
and a unique gift for problem solving.
Pat Sandra graduated from Ghent
University, Belgium, in 1967 with a
B.Sc. in chemistry and in 1969 with a
master’s degree in organic chemistry,
and was immediately invited to
join Professor Maurice Verzele’s
laboratory to begin a Ph.D. thesis on
the contribution of hops to the flavour
of beer, a topic that had become
controversial at the time in Belgium,
where beer is an integral part of the
culture. Unravelling the complexity of
a beer extract required high-resolution
techniques and this research led
directly to Sandra’s early career focus
in capillary gas chromatography (GC).
Six years later, Sandra successfully
defended his Ph.D. at Ghent University
and just one year later he joined
the Faculty of Sciences at Ghent
University as an Assistant Professor.
By 1985, however, Sandra
was growing frustrated with the
department’s reluctance to back him
in broadening Ghent’s research field
in separation sciences and to start
investigations in supercritical fluid
chromatography (SFC) and capillary
electrophoresis (CE). By 1st February
1986, Sandra quit the university.
Inspired by entrepreneurs such as
Rudolf Kaiser, Sandra started the
Research Institute for Chromatography
(RIC), surviving through teaching
courses on GC and GC coupled to
mass spectrometry (MS), as well as
sponsorships from Carlo Erba and
later from Hewlett-Packard. Two
years after quitting the university,
however, Sandra accepted an offer
by the head of the department to
return and become the new head
of the separation science group. A
fruitful collaboration on capillary GC
then began between Sandra’s own
RIC and Ghent’s separation science
group. Splitting his time between the
institute and his new responsibilities
at the university, Sandra decided to
focus the university department’s
research on high performance liquid
chromatography (HPLC), CE, SFC, and
hyphenated systems, and that work
led to a number of advances.
In 1991, Sandra accepted an
invitation to be a visiting professor at
Eindhoven University of Technology
in The Netherlands, teaching a
course in environmental analysis. A
further opportunity arrived in January
1998, when Sandra was appointed
Professor in Analytical Chemistry at
the University of Stellenbosch, South
Africa. There, he established a centre
of excellence in separation sciences
and received the A1 status. For seven
years he shuttled between Belgium
and South Africa to fulfill his duties at
the different universities and at
the RIC.
Sandra continued to make waves.
He co-founded the Pfizer Analytical
Research Centre at Ghent University
in 2003, and became its director. He
continued his links with South Africa
where he became Extraordinary
Professor at the University of
Stellenbosch from 2006 to 2013. In
2013 he was invited by President
Barroso of the European Community
to become member of the Research
Councel of the EU.
Meanwhile, he continued to develop
and expand his business. Following
the success of the RIC in Belgium,
Sandra founded a second facility
in Lille, France, in 2001 to focus on
method development, act as the
exclusive distributor of Gerstel GmbH,
as well as a value-added reseller
(VAR) of Agilent Technologies. In
— Lewis Botcherby
-$r($�&VSPQF March 2017126
Pat Sandra, 2017 Lifetime Achievement in Chromatography
Deirdre, 2017 Emerging Leader in Chromatography
2016, he cofounded with his sons
Tom and Koen anaRIC biologics, a
centre combining R&D and GMP for
biopharmaceuticals
We interviewed several of Pat’s
colleagues, friends, and former students
about his career, achievements, impact,
and relationships.
Expansive and GroundbreakingSandra is well known for his expansive
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important period in capillary GC to
unique sampling techniques and GC
instrumentation, supercritical fluid
chromatography, and more recently,
to biomolecular separations,” Novotny
said. “He is clearly one of the most
influential scientists in our field.”
“Pat always had an excellent
feeling for the critical ‘pain-points’
in separation science,” added Frank
David, the R&D Director of Chemical
Analysis at the RIC.
In particular, Sandra’s ability to
take on new technologies has truly
impressed other scientists in the field.
“He has always been one of the first to
embrace new technological evolutions
and very often he is lying at the origin
of them,” said Gert Desmet, Professor
at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. “He
was doing separations no one else
could do.”
“Pat’s career can be defined
by the almost intuitive selection of
successful research topics before they
even exist or become mainstream,”
added Frederic Lynen, his successor
at Ghent University. “He was for
example performing GC–MS based
‘metabolomics’ long before the
terminology was coined. That is also
true for his lipodomics, chiral, capillary
electrochromatography (CEC), and
LC×LC work.”
Early ResearchSandra’s early research focus on
capillary gas chromatography
stemmed from the work he did during
his doctoral work under Maurice
Verzele, who laid down the gauntlet
for Sandra to continue the technique’s
development. Sandra obliged. In the
next 10 years, he pioneered numerous
developments that contributed to
state-of-the-art GC column technology.
Those contributions included surface
treatment by leaching, dendrite and
whisker formation, deactivation by
persilylation and with amino-alcohols,
immobilization of the stationary
phases, introduction of new stationary
phases (such as superoxes,
crosslinkable biscyanosilicone phases,
and silanol-terminated silicone
phases), and more (1).
Frank David remembers those days
when he worked under Sandra as a
master’s student in 1982 at Ghent.
“The themes we were working on at
the university in the 1980s included
capillary GC column technology,
injection, miniaturized sample
preparation, and multidimensional
GC,” David said. “The results of
that research have undoubtedly
contributed to the ‘mature’ state of GC
today.”
A story from that time illustrates a
common theme mentioned throughout
our interviews: Sandra’s flexibility and
creativity as well as his determination
to succeed.
Carlo Bicchi spent some time working
in Verzele’s laboratory in 1984, while
visiting from Turin University. During
that time, he collaborated with Sandra’s
group, working with the young Frank
David on direct capture of volatiles
emitted from living plants. Because of
an unusual story related to academic
jealousies, Bicchi said, Sandra was
suddenly left without instruments, so
he and David had to move their work to
Sandra’s own Siemens heartcut
GC–GC instrument. In their work
up to that point, the volatiles
were being captured on thick film
polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) column
traps by sorption, and the recovery of
-$r($�&VSPQF March 2017128
The 2017 LCGC Awards
Pat Sandra and Jean-Marie Dimandja prepare to present the John B. Phillips Award for Outstanding GC×GC publication at the 1st Dalian International Symposia and Exhibition on Chromatography held in Dalian, China (June 2007).
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A young Pat Sandra relaxes with his wife Martina.
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the volatiles was planned to be carried out by a completely
different system based on conventional GC. But suddenly,
that conventional GC instrument was no longer available
to the team. So Bicchi and David had a long, two-day
discussion with Pat, and then designed a new system.
“After a lot of experiments, myself and Frank under Pat’s
supervision successfully assembled a primitive but effective
direct resistively heated system to desorb the trapped
analytes,” Bicchi relates. “To the best of my knowledge, it
was one of the first times where sorption was applied to
headspace sampling, after Kurt Grob’s introduction, and a
chromatographic column was directly heated.”
As referenced earlier, Sandra always had a unique
intuition for chromatography, right from the beginning. That
intuition extended to recognizing the crucial innovations of
others, and led, for example, to his early recognition of the
importance of flexible fused-silica GC columns introduced
by Dandeneau and Zerenner (2). This view contributed
heavily to the early direction of Sandra’s research and was
a view he maintained, despite some vocal opposition from
proponents of alternatives. History has since vindicated his
conclusion.
But for Sandra’s keen chromatographic intuition and
creativity to flourish, he needed to step outside the relative
safety of academia.
Separation EntrepreneurSince its foundation in 1986, Sandra’s company, the
Research Institute for Chromatography (RIC), has gone
from strength to strength. Frank David has been there to
witness its growth from the beginning. “It was of course
a challenge for him, and partly for me, to start a private
“PAT’S CAREER CAN BE DEFINED BY THE ALMOST INTUITIVE SELECTION OF SUCCESSFUL RESEARCH TOPICS BEFORE THEY EVEN EXIST OR BECOME MAINSTREAM”FREDERIC LYNEN
www.chromatographyonline.com
The 2017 LCGC Awards
Pat Sandra and Frederic Lynen at Pat’s retirement party in 2012.
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company independent from the safe
haven of the university,” David said.
“However, I believe it was a very
exciting experience for the both of us,
and we could enjoy a unique position
as a research institute in between
the academic world, industry, and
instrument manufacturers.”
But the challenges of setting up
a new company can be daunting
and none more so than the financial
element. Surviving from grants in
the early days came at a cost
of missed opportunities, as
Sandra referenced in the book
Chromatography—A Century of
Discovery 1900–2000: The Bridge
to the Sciences/Technology (1).
An example was the work Sandra
undertook in 1986 with resistant
heated capillaries. “Fused silica
tubing was enveloped in a
stainless-steel jacket, insulated like
an electrical wire, and the metal
column ends were connected to
a power supply,” he recounted.
“Retention time reproducibility was
not excellent, but nevertheless the
principle was patent pending for one
year.” Because of a lack of funds,
however, Sandra could not continue
the patent application. “A missed
opportunity—resistively heated
column GC, what we called at that
time flash GC,” said Sandra.
Setbacks weren’t going to stop
Sandra, however. “Pat’s work ethic
has always been impeccable,” notes
Lynen. “He is the kind of character
who is always polite and friendly to
everybody while never compromising
on his scientific no-nonsense attitude.”
That work ethic would imbue Sandra’s
achievements in the late 1980s and
1990s as he split his time between
his recently formed company, newly
acquired academic responsibilities in
his role as director of the separation
science group of the organic chemistry
department at Ghent University,
symposium organizing, and editorial
roles.
Patently InnovativeIn addition to his stellar work in
capillary GC, Sandra has also
contributed to a remarkably
broad span of research areas.
“He has a prominent spot in the
history books as one of the great
experimentalists in chromatography,”
said Desmet. Sandra’s work includes
both fundamental and applied
high-level research in all forms of
chromatography, including HPLC,
SFC, electrophoresis, and micellar
electrokinetic chromatography
(MEKC). Hyphenating these with
on-line sample preparation and
mass spectrometric detection, he
has applied these techniques across
multiple application fields, including
the chemical and petrochemical
industries, food science,
environmental analysis, forensic
analysis, pharmaceuticals, and the
life sciences. His publiactions in all
these different fields and techniques
are witnessing this.
“Certainly, Pat is always attacking
the cutting edges of the research in
the field of separation science,” said
Andrei Medvedovici, Professor and
Dean of the Faculty of Chemistry
at the University of Bucharest in
Romania. “He is always first or
among the first to develop new
frontiers.” Milton Lee echoed that
sentiment. “Few, if any, have such an
all-encompassing perspective of the
field,” he said.
As a result, detailing all the
contributions in Sandra’s later career
is a mammoth task. Certainly, a
well referenced development was
his work in sample preparation and
more specifically the development of
stir-bar sorptive extraction (SBSE),
which went on to be commercialized
with Gerstel as the “Twister”
technology. His early work with
SFC resulted in the development of
multicolumn chiral analysis and
improved lipid analysis by applying
silver ion chromatography and
coordination ion-spray mass
spectrometry. Furthermore, Sandra
introduced chiral CEC and various
novel approaches for chiral CE and
MEKC, as well as inventing “per
aqueous” liquid chromatography
(PALC). The 2000s saw Sandra’s
attention shift towards HPLC with
notable work in ultrahigh-pressure
LC (UHPLC), high temperature
LC, and multidimensional LC. In
more recent years, together with
his son Koen Sandra, his attention
has shifted towards the application
of chromatographic and mass
spectrometric techniques in life
sciences with a particularly emphasis
in biopharmaceuticals and omics.
He is an innovator, and the span of
his innovation has been enormous.
This work also led to many patents—
despite missed opportunities like that
for flash GC.
The Problem SolverOne of the most famous and
well referenced stories relating
to Sandra stems from his work to
solve the Belgian dioxin crisis in 1999,
which some consider his greatest
accomplishment. “By properly
managing expectations and quickly
developing and implementing rapid
analysis methods, Pat managed to
help defuse a crisis of truly great
proportions,” said
Tadeusz Górecki,
a professor at
the University
of Waterloo,
Canada. “In
the process,
he put
separation
science front
and centre
for the
Pat talking during his surprise “Farewell” party held after HTC 2012, Bruges, Belgium.
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The 2017 LCGC Awards
general public to see and became a face for
chromatography, at least in Belgium.”
The crisis originated from chicken farmers’ observations
of premature death and nervous disorders among chicks,
combined with a high ratio of eggs failing to hatch. While
various theories were postulated, dioxin contamination was
the lead theory, championed by a laboratory specialized in the
analysis of such compounds. But with a four-week response
time for dioxin analysis, the crisis was spiralling. Four months
after the initial problems were reported, strong measures were
taken to protect the public from food contamination, including
the destruction of eggs, chickens, and all related products.
Yet the source of the contamination was still unknown.
“At the same time, the Belgian government released
some confusing information, including the statement that
these analyses were extremely complex and could take
several weeks,” said Frank David, who was working at the
RIC with Sandra when the crisis was unfolding. Sandra
and others at the RIC remained unconvinced that dioxins
only could contaminate food products at ppb levels without
the presence of other chlorine-containing contaminants
in much higher levels. They instead believed the high
dioxin (PCDF and PCDD) ratios seen in poultry samples