The Satinder Ahuja Award for Young Investigators in Separation Science

Katelynn Perrault will receive the Satinder Ahuja Award for Young Investigators in Separation Science during a session that starts at 8:30 am in Room W181B. Perrault is an assistant professor of Forensic Sciences and Chemistry at Chaminade University of Honolulu in Hawaii. Her research focuses on the use of multidimensional chromatography for odor analysis applications. Her talk will address comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GCxGC) for the analysis of postmortem microbes. In the forensic sciences, postmortem microbial succession can be used to estimate the postmortem interval (PMI) in death investigations. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) produced by microbes on human remains can provide foundational data to understand microbial succession patterns. In the study Perrault will discuss today, VOC profiles were reported for two newly characterized species of postmortem microbes using GCxGC with mass spectrometry detection (GC×GC–MS).

Next, John Dimandja of the Georgia Institute of Technology, will discuss standardization of retention information in GCxGC.  The goal of standardizing the information contained in individual GCxGC chromatograms is the creation of a database that can be used for qualitative analysis of compounds in untargeted investigations. Efforts to standardize bi-dimensional GC chromatograms will be given, and a roadmap to the establishment of the standardized GCxGC database will be outlined.

Pierre-Hugues Stefanuto of the University of Liège, in Belgium, will follow, giving a talk on multimodal approaches for untargeted screening for medical applications of the human volatilome. He will address the complementarity of two very different techniques, GCxGC–MS and elected ion flow tube mass spectrometry (SIFT-MS) for the field of volatilomics.

After the recess, Chiara Cordero of the University of Turin will discuss state-of-the art research in the field of odorants ad volatiles characterization in food using GCxGC–MS. This work will illustrate how hyphenating GGxGC with MS, along with olfactometry, accurate quantitation, suitable sample preparation, and dedicated data mining can capture essential information on odor patterns.

Robert Synovec of the University of Washington will close the session with a talk on advances in multidimensional GC instrumentation and chemometric data analysis. His group has been developing a novel form of differential flow modulation for GCxGC referred to as dynamic pressure gradient modulation (DPGM), which is simple to apply, provides a 100% duty cycle, and produces narrow peaks.