Category: Recognition

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Recognition

Bob Pirok wins HTC Innovation Award

Bob Pirok wins HTC Innovation Award

The HTC Innovation Award was launched by LCGC International and the HTC Scientific Committee and Industry Board in honour of separation scientists who make pioneering contributions to the field of analytical separation science, with a strong focus on applications that benefit society. At the award ceremony Prof. Deirdre Cabooter (KU Leuven), Chair of the HTC-18 Scientific Committee, acknowledged Pirok’s “impressive research output”, working on polymer characterization (including pyrolysis-gas chromatography and hydrodynamic chromatography), and multidimensional liquid chromatography separations, using the interface between separation dimensions as a point of chemical transformation employing light degradation or digestion with immobilized enzymes.

Teamwork achievements

According to Cabooter, the award particularly recognizes Pirok’s research on using cutting-edge machine learning and chemometric approaches to automate method development for both one-dimensional as well as two-dimensional liquid chromatography separations. “Since method development for complex samples, such as synthetic polymers and oligonucleotides in medicinal drugs, is currently a true bottleneck, the impact of automating this process on many research fields and industries cannot be underestimated. The same approaches can also be extended to other techniques, such as comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GC×GC), further broadening the application field to, for example, hydrocarbons.”

Upon receiving the award, Pirok said to be very honoured and he accepted the prize “as a representative of a great team of people who made this work possible, in particular Tijmen Bos, Stef Molenaar, and Jim Boelrijk. These achievements are due to our teamwork. I feel blessed with the many academic and industrial collaborations and opportunities that have come on my path with great scientists around the globe. They have contributed massively to the fully automatic AutoLC method-development system that helped me earn the award”. Pirok’s research team runs several industrial-academic projects, mainly with the pharmaceutical and polymer industry. His group is known for bringing its research into education and vice versa.

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Recognition

Gargano and Pirok featured in ‘Top 40 Under 40’ of analytical scientists worldwide

The Analytical Scientist Power List

CAST researchers Andrea Gargano and Bob Pirok were featured for the second time in a row in the Top 40 Under 40 by The Analytical Scientists. The magazine has published profiles of all listed scientists, including their analyses of the current state of affairs, their predictions for the future, and their personal mission statements. 

The magazine presents the list as a celebration of ‘analytical science’s rising stars, who will, hopefully, provide the answers to the 21st century’s biggest questions’. It was compiled upon nomination by the readers of the magazine and shortlisting by an independent panel of expert judges.

"Modern separation technology, especially multi-dimensional, has the capabilities to crack many analytical problems in public and private labs. It is unacceptable that you rarely see this stuff applied in routine environments."

Bob Pirok

I think analytical science needs to grow even more into a more multidisciplinary and broader community rather than following a spiral of hyper-specialization.

Andrea Gargano

Further Reading

Categories
Recognition

Pirok featured in the Analytical Scientist Power List 2021

Pirok, Schoenmakers and Somsen in the Analytical Scientist Top 100 Power List 2021

The Power List is established by a poll among the readers of The Analytical Scientist and represents the 100 world’s most influential analytical scientists as an inspiration to their fellows. Every year, readers and visitors of its website are allowed to nominate scientists, engineers, software developers or business leaders from the analytical sciences field.

In his feature interview, Assistant Professor Bob Pirok describes the risk of the analytical sciences being drawn into a “pit fight where the focus is not on the quality of our methods but the quantity of meaningless numbers.” He makes the case for the effective and robust use of well-known powerful separation systems such as 2D LC-MS, rather than “solving the analytical problem by complicating it further” with the development of ever more multidimensional separation techniques. The primary solution is in teaching.

Professor Govert Somsen, who – like Peter Schoenmakers, earlier recalled the major steps that analytical sciences had made: “I started doing intact protein analysis in an era of booming bottom-up proteomics, but our first protein peaks were questionable and people thought we were crazy. Now, after persistent development, we can assign hundreds of proteoforms of a single protein in just one run!”.

Professor Peter Schoenmakers predicts the development of more and more ‘self-steering’ instruments, in analogue to the progression of self-steering cars. “The need may even be greater, because there is a greater shortage of qualified analysts than qualified drivers.” According to Schoenmakers, the biggest challenge to the analytical sciences is to identify upcoming crises in health, food, and the environment before they arrive. “This requires high-resolution non-target analysis and very smart data analysis.”

From left to right: Govert Somsen, Bob Pirok and Peter Schoenmakers at Science Park Amsterdam.