Automated LC Method Development: An HTC-18 Interview with Bob Pirok

At HTC-18 in Leuven, Executive Editor of LCGC International, Alasdair Matheson, spoke to this year’s winner of the 2024 HTC-18 Innovation Award, Bob Pirok from the University of Amsterdam, about his innovative research on automated LC method development.

Bob Pirok is currently assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam and focuses on the application of chemometrics to analytical chemistry with a special interest in method development and data analysis for multidimensional chromatography. His other areas of interest include retention modelling and (reaction) modulation techniques for LC×LC. Pirok is a visiting research professor at Gustavus Adolphus College in the group of Professor Dwight R. Stoll. Bob has received several international recognitions, including a Shimadzu Young-Scientist Award at HPLC2015 Beijing, the Young-Scientist-Award Lecture during the SCM-8 meeting in Amsterdam in 2017, the Csaba Horváth Young-Scientist Award at HPLC2017 Prague, the Journal of Chromatography Award during the ISCC Conference in Riva de Garda in 2018, and the SCM Award at the SCM-9 meeting in Amsterdam in 2019. Bob is member of the European Chemistry Thematic Network and an active member of LCGC International’s editorial advisory board (EAB).

In this video interview, Bob discussed the following topics:

• Congratulations on winning the HTC-18 Innovation Award. What is innovative about the work you presented on automated LC method development?
• What is your mission and vision for this project?
• How do you envisage these innovations to eventually benefit society?
• Can you place your work in the context of other developments within the scientific community?
• On your website you write these innovations require a lot of interdisciplinary collaborations.
• Exactly how interdisciplinary is this?
• In your talk you mentioned that your teaching activities heavily affect this work. Can you explain this a bit further?
• What next? How do you see this work developing further?
• You are collaborating with Peter Schoenmakers on a textbook focusing on analytical separations. Can you tell us more about this project?