LCGC Announces the 2019 Winners of the Lifetime Achievement and Emerging Leader in Chromatography Awards

LCGC, the leading resource for separation scientists, is proud to announce that Milos V. Novotny and Ken Broeckhoven are the winners of the 12^th annual LCGC Lifetime Achievement and Emerging Leader in Chromatography Awards, respectively. Novotny and Broeckhoven will be honored in a symposium as part of the technical program at the Pittcon 2019 conference in Philadelphia on March 19, 2019.

The Lifetime Achievement Award

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

Novotny, the 2019 winner, received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in biochemistry from the University of Brno (now Masaryk University), in what is now the Czech Republic. In 1968, he emigrated to Sweden and held a position of Research Assistant Professor at the Royal Karolinska Institute in Stockholm in mass spectrometry. He then moved to the United States as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Houston, Texas. In 1971, he was appointed an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Indiana University; he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1974 and Full Professor in 1978. In 1988, he was named the James H. Rudy Professor of Chemistry, in 1999 a Distinguished Professor, and in 2000 became additionally the Lilly Chemistry Alumni Chair. At Indiana University, he was Director of the National Center for Glycomics and Glycoproteomics (2004–2009). He is currently the Director of the Institute for Pheromone Research and the Director of the Novotny Glycoscience Laboratory.

Novotny’s contributions to the field of chromatography span a wide range of activities. He was a pioneer in virtually all capillary separation techniques, starting with significant surface treatment technologies in the preparation of glass capillary columns for gas chromatography (GC) and the first credible combination of capillary GC with mass spectrometry (MS) in the late 1960s and continuing with his conceptually important work in capillary liquid chromatography (LC) and supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) in the late 1970s, followed by seminal contributions to capillary electrophoresis (CE) and capillary electrochromatography (CEC) of peptides and carbohydrates about 10 years later. He is known as a major contributor to important methodologies, based on LC–MS and CE, in the areas of glycomics and glycoproteomics. He also made a unique contribution to separation science and society at large by designing two chromatographic columns that were an important component of miniaturized GC–MS equipment that was landed on the surface of Mars in July 1976 by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the Viking Mission.

Novotny received an Honoris causa doctorate from Uppsala University (Sweden) in 1991, a Doctor of Science degree from his alma mater Masaryk University in 1992, and an honorary doctorate from Charles University, in Prague, in 2007. Novotny was named a foreign member of two scientific academies: the Royal Society for Sciences, Sweden (1999) and the Learned Society/Academy of Czech Republic (2005). He has received more than 40 national and international awards, medals, and other distinctions for his work. Novotny has published more than 500 papers, many with high number of citations.

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.

Broeckhoven, the 2019 winner, received his PhD in 2010 from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), in Brussels, Belgium. Following post-doctoral research at VUB and work as a visiting researcher in the separation processes laboratory at ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, he became a research professor at VUB in 2012. He was subsequently promoted to Assistant Professor and then to his current position as an Associate Professor in 2017. He is also part of the organizing and scientific committee of the biennial HTC (Hyphenated Techniques in Chromatography) conference series and a member of the ChiMiC consortium, which brings together five academic groups in Belgium researching chromatographic techniques.

Important areas of Broeckhoven’s work include theoretical and experimental studies applying the kinetic plot method to gradient chromatography, laying the basis for the application of the method to other LC modalities and toward its use in SFC and GC; developing a novel solution for the effects of viscous heating in ultrahigh-pressure liquid chromatography (UHPLC); the first demonstration of the use of very high operating pressure (up to 2600 bar) in typical column dimensions (2.1 mm ID columns) used in UHPLC instrumentation, and later extending this approach to gradient chromatography; shedding light on the future direction and limits of separations power in liquid chromatography, including the importance of extracolumn band broadening as one of the limiting factors for further improvements in separation speed and efficiency; and revealing the significant effect that turbulent flow in the connection tubing can have on the operating pressure and separation results in supercritical chromatography.

Broeckhoven has published 61 papers, with more than 850 citations, and has an h-index of 19. He has also given more than 40 oral and 52 poster presentations at scientific conferences, one of which received first place in the poster award competition at HPLC 2008 conference in Boston.

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