LCGC Announces the 2017 Winners of the Lifetime Achievement and Emerging Leader in Chromatography Awards

LCGC, the leading resource for separation scientists, is proud to announce that Pat Sandra and Deirdre Cabooter are the winners of the 10th annual LCGC Lifetime Achievement and Emerging Leader in Chromatography Awards, respectively. Sandra and Cabooter will be honored in a symposium as part of the technical program at the Pittcon 2017 conference in Chicago, in March 2017.

The Lifetime Achievement Award
The Lifetime Achievement in Chromatography Award honors a seasoned professional for a lifetime of contributions to the advancement of chromatographic techniques and applications.

Pat Sandra, the 2017 winner, received his PhD in 1975 from Ghent University in Belgium. He became an associate professor there the following year and was promoted to full Professor of Separation Sciences in 1988. He also spent time as a visiting professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology, in The Netherlands (1991–2000) and at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa (1998–2013).

In 1986 he founded the Research Institute for Chromatography in Belgium, a center for research and education in chromatography, mass spectrometry, and capillary electrophoresis (CE). RIC now employs 35 people with branches in Belgium and France. In 2016, he cofounded anaRIC biologics, a company delivering top tailor-made analytical services for pharmaceutical and biotech companies in need of expediting their biologics drug development process.

Sandra and his research groups have been active in all modern separation science techniques-liquid chromatography (LC), gas chromatography (GC), supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC), CE, micellar electrokinetic chromatography (MEKC), and capillary electrochromatography (CEC). They also made important developments in sample preparation (receiving a patent for stir-bar sorptive extraction), high-temperature capillary GC, immobilization of GC phases, and coupled techniques especially with mass spectrometry and inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry.

Sandra has applied these techniques to a wide array of problems from many different domains, including natural product research, environmental analysis, food analysis, enantioselective synthesis, pharmaceutical analysis, and life sciences. In this framework he offered the Belgian government quick analytical solutions to solve for the 1999 Belgian dioxin crisis.

His recent interests have been related to biopharmaceuticals and biosimilars and the development of analytical methods to fully characterize monoclonal antibodies.

Sandra has coauthored over 550 scientific publications and presented over 300 invited lectures at scientific meetings. He was the chair and organizer of the International Symposia on Capillary Chromatography in Riva del Garda, Italy, from 1983 to 2010. He has received numerous international awards, including, among others, the 1989 Tswett Award, the 1994 Martin Gold Medal, the 1995 Golay Award, the 2005 ACS Award in Chromatography, the 2008 EAS Award in Chromatography, the 2008 CASSS Award for Innovative Contributions to Separation Science, the 2009 John Knox Award, the 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award for Outstanding Achievements in Hyphenated Separation Techniques from LCGC Europe, and the 2013 Csaba Horvath Award.

He holds five patents and has another seven patent filings pending.

The Emerging Leader Award
The Emerging Leader in Chromatography Award recognizes the achievements and aspirations of a talented young separation scientist who has made strides early in his or her career toward the advancement of chromatographic techniques and applications.

Deirdre Cabooter, the 2017 winner, is an associate professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical and Pharmacological Sciences at the University of Leuven in Belgium. She works on a broad range of topics in separation science. Her key contributions to the field are related to the fundamental investigation of mass transfer phenomena in liquid chromatography, the comparison and evaluation of liquid chromatography techniques using the kinetic plot method, the development of generic, automatable method development strategies for the analysis of complex samples, and the evaluation and application of microfluidic devices for chromatographic separations.

Cabooter obtained a research professor position at the University of Leuven when she was only 30 years old. She currently leads a research group of one post-doctoral researcher and three PhD students of which she is the direct promoter, and three more of which she is the copromoter. Three of her students have already successfully defended their PhDs. To support this group, she has in the past three years been able to attract over 600,000 euros of funding.

Cabooter has published 59 manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals and given 35 oral and 49 poster presentations at national and international congresses and symposia. In 2015, she became a member of the editorial board of Journal of Chromatography A.

She is a co-organizer of the International Symposium on Hyphenated Techniques in Chromatography, and was the co-chair of the Pharmaceutical and Chiral Analysis Session at the 32nd International Symposium on Microscale Separations and Bioanalysis (MSB 2016). She was also part of the scientific committee of SEP 2015, a national conference on chromatography, which was held in Paris, France, in March 2015.

Visit the LCGC website or information about past LCGC award winners or for information on how to nominate a candidate for a future award.