Inside the Laboratory: The Schug Group at the University of Texas at Arlington

Inside the Laboratory is a joint series with LCGC and Spectroscopy, profiling analytical scientists and their research groups at universities all over the world. This series will spotlight the current chromatographic and spectroscopic research their group is conducting, and the importance of their research in analytical chemistry and specific industries. In this edition of “Inside the Laboratory,” Kevin Schug, PhD, a full professor of chemistry at the University of Texas at Arlington, discusses his laboratory’s group work in environmental monitoring around water and soil quality near oil and gas extraction, using techniques such as liquid chromatography (LC), gas chromatography (GC), supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC), and coupling these techniques with mass spectrometry (MS).

The Schug Laboratory at the University of Texas at Arlington has been using multiple chromatographic techniques in a wide range of applications, including environmental monitoring. For example, the group uses liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS), gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS), and supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC), sometimes coupled with MS, to examine oil and gas extraction processes, including looking for chemicals that are associated with fracking in oil and gas extraction.

Kevin Schug, the Shimadzu Distinguished Professor of Analytical Chemistry at The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), is the lead investigator of this laboratory group. Schug earned his BS in Chemistry at the College of William and Mary, before attending graduate school at Virginia Tech under the guidance of Prof. Harold M. McNair. Schug conducted his postdoctoral research at the University of Vienna under the tutelage of Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Lindner, who received LCGC International’s 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award in Chromatography. Since joining UTA in 2005, Schug has been at the forefront of research across several disciplines, including environmental, pharmaceutical, biological, and energy research. With over 200 peer-reviewed publications and numerous presentations, Schug’s work has not only advanced scientific inquiry, but he has also served as a mentor to countless students, guiding their academic and professional growth. Schug has been recognized with many awards in his career, including the University of Texas System Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award and the J. Calvin Giddings Award for Excellence in Analytical Chemistry Education. Schug is also a Fellow of both the University of Texas System’s and the University of Texas at Arlington’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers.

LCGC International recently sat down with Schug to talk about his group’s work.

Kevin Schug, the Shimadzu Distinguished Professor of Analytical Chemistry at The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). Photo Credit: © Kevin Schug

Can you talk about the analytical techniques that your group used in your most recent research project?

What I enjoy about being able to do research in our laboratory is that we have a wide variety of instruments, and we try to use all of them. During my PhD, I was trained in LC and GC and started working mainly with LC–MS. However, we also got into some environmental work using GC–MS. As time went on, we even added SFC. So my laboratory group uses the full range of different chromatography techniques, coupled with MS mainly. We also do some work with vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) absorption and GC detection.

Can you explain the importance of your research within the broader field of analytical chemistry or in a specific industry/application?

In the past, we have looked at unconventional oil and gas extraction processes. That did involve a lot of work on environmental monitoring and developing new methods to look for chemicals that are associated with fracking and oil and gas extraction. More recently, we've been working on characterizing the treatment of produced water, which is the wastewater that comes up with the oil and gas. There's been a lot of effort to try to develop new treatment technologies that could get the water to a certain level of cleanliness, where it could be either reused for fracking, or maybe for some other industrial applications such as farming. That's certainly a challenge given the range of things that are in there, but that type of study has required using every type of analytical technique in the book. To be able to look at metals, we use inductively coupled plasma–MS (ICP-MS). We use matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization–MS (MALDI–MS) and DNA sequencing to look at microbes, GC for volatiles and semi-volatiles, and then even doing a lot of targeted and untargeted work with LC to look for nonvolatile components, including PFAS.

And then, our whole goal is to try to make some bulk measurements of the water. We want to try to be able to correlate some of those bulk measurements with the more detailed chemical measurements that we make because as these techniques evolve, and people try to reuse these waste streams, we can't necessarily put it all through the full battery of analytical techniques every time because it's just too time consuming and expensive. Therefore, we want to be able to show how we could use some kind of bulk measurements like total organic carbon (TOC) and conductivity as a surrogate to sort of give an idea of how clean these waters would be, and where they could be reused.

We've also been working with industry leaders to try to develop methods that we can better characterize pyrolysis oil. So, they take waste plastic, heat it up in an oxygen-free environment, and then it renders it into an oil, which can then be refined into fuels and chemical feedstocks. For that, we use SFC and GC. With the range of stuff that's out there, we also are in a place where we can look at the hydrocarbons and all the other polars compounds in them as well, because they are the ones that can really affect the catalytic processing of oil. We can use the full suite of instrumentation we have to investigate this topic.

On the pharmaceutical analysis side, we are trying to develop a multimodal LC instrument that would allow us to characterize different advanced drug delivery modalities with one injection. So that kind of feeds into a more multi-dimensional LC separation, and then a variety of different detectors to try to get as much information from one injection as possible.

We’re always interested in new ways to use techniques that are out there. I have a student who's working on finishing her PhD using vacuum-assisted solid-phase microextraction (SPME). Her work is exploring the idea that, in a headspace vial, you can decrease the pressure, allowing more semi-volatile compounds to get into the headspace that you cannot extract using traditional SPME.

How do you stay updated with advancements in analytical chemistry techniques and technologies?

I would say we rely very heavily on our interactions with industry. Our industry partners have their fingers on the pulse of what really are the major problems and, you know, what are the things where if you develop new analytical techniques, people really need them. So, I think we rely on trying to get that information, not just from the literature or from conference presentations, but with interacting closely with industry partners.

Can you discuss a recent innovation or development that you find particularly impactful or exciting?

I think pyrolysis oils one is a big one. Everybody wants to be able to recycle these plastics more efficiently, but you have such variability in the feedstocks, and nobody will separate all their plastics ahead of time because it’s very labor intensive. So, you end up wanting to be able to pyrolyze all these plastics together. But when you do that, you get a very complex mixture that changes with the feedstock. Therefore, trying to use variety of different techniques, such as SFC, to better speciate some of these oils will help us better understand what feedstock goes in and what we get out of it.

I also wanted to mention that we've been excited about the recent work that we've been doing on psilocybin mushrooms. At the beginning of this year, we published a method for potency determination of psilocybin and psilocybin in these mushrooms. The idea there is not for forensics purposes, but to help better provide methods that could be used in developing dosing for clinical studies. We’ve been working closely with medical doctors in that area to try to develop that. And then because of our interest in doing some untargeted LC–MS work, we've started to try and understand the other compounds that are in the mushrooms that are also potentially bioactive.