LCGC Announces the 2024 Winners of the Lifetime Achievement and Emerging Leader in Chromatography Awards

LCGC, the leading resource for separation scientists, is proud to announce that Wolfgang Lindner and Martina Catani are the winners of the 17th annual Lifetime Achievement and Emerging Leader in Chromatography Awards. Lindner and Catani will be honored in a symposium as part of the technical program at the Pittcon 2024 conference in February.

The Lifetime Achievement Award

Wolfgang Lindner is the winner of the 2024 Lifetime Achievement in Chromatography Award.

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

Lindner, professor emeritus in analytical chemistry at the University of Vienna and the 2024 winner, has made significant contributions in liquid chromatography (LC) and the development of chiral drugs. He has developed and licensed several chiral stationary phases that have been widely used by both researchers and the pharmaceutical industry. He has applied separations of enantiomers to pharmacokinetics of chiral drugs and to metabolomics of endogenous compounds, such as amino and hydroxyl acids.

The focus on Lindner’s research has been molecular recognition, understanding the non-covalent binding of the analyte to be separated with the chiral stationary phase, including the contributions of the associated mobile phase components. He has also created highly selective mixed mode and hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography (HILIC) phases as well as arginine modifications for liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC–MS) analysis of highly basic peptides. In all cases, he has focused on the fundamental physico-chemical principles to create highly selective separations.

In the 1980s, Lindner introduced O,O-diacyltartaric acid anhydrides as chiral derivatizing agents for diastereoisomer separations. These agents were commercialized and are still in use for analysis and the production of enantiomerically pure drugs. In the 1990s, he developed and licensed cinchona-based (quinine) chiral anion exchange columns that have been widely used, both at the analytical and preparative scale.

His most important advancement occurred with the creation of chiral zwitterionic stationary phases for the separation of positive, negative, and ampholytic compounds. Taking a highly creative approach, Lindner combined a chiral amidosulfonic acid with the basic quinine and quinidine type scaffolds. Over the years many of these columns have been licensed and commercialized, both at the analytical and preparative scale, and have had significant impact in the pharmaceutical industry.

The Emerging Leader Award

Martina Catani is the winner of the 2024 Emerging Leader in Chromatography Award.

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

Catani is an assistant professor of analytical chemistry at the University of Ferrara and the 2024 winner. Her research focuses on the purification of polypeptides, oligonucleotides, and proteins by means of single-column and continuous countercurrent multi-column preparative liquid chromatography (LC); separation of natural cannabinoids; and investigation of kinetic and thermodynamic phenomena in chiral and achiral high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC). These studies contributed to the revival of the debate about the best particle characteristics for high-efficiency separations.

She has also worked on the development of purification methods for therapeutic bio-macromolecules using both single-column and continuous multicolumn preparative liquid chromatography.

Catani actively collaborates with industry leaders to solve real-world problems. She’s worked closely with the multinational pharmaceutical company Fresenius Kabi iPSUM on the development of continuous purification methods for therapeutic peptides and with Merck on the purification of a carrier protein for vaccines through captureSMB on affinity resins.

In 2018, Catani was awarded the Csaba Horvath Award, which is presented annually to a separation scientist under the age of 35 at the HPLC conference. She is also the recipient of the 2021 Young Researcher Award conferred by the Analytical Chemistry Division of the Italian Chemical Society.

Catani has spent time researching at VUB Brussels in Belgium under Gert Desmet, and at the University of Pécs in Hungary under the supervision of Attila Felinger. In 2019 she was a postdoctoral research fellow at ETH Zurich in Switzerland in the group of Massimo Morbidelli.

Visit the LCGC website for information about past LCGC award winners or for information on how to nominate a candidate for the 2025 Lifetime Achievement and Emerging Leader in Chromatography Awards.