Category: Recognition

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Recognition

Ervin sz. Kováts Award for Young Scientists Awarded to Dr. Tijmen S. Bos​

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Ervin sz. Kováts Award for Young Scientists Awarded to Dr. Tijmen S. Bos

 

At the 14th Balaton Symposium on High-Performance Separation Methods, held this week, Dr. Tijmen S. Bos received the Ervin sz. Kováts Award for Young Scientists. This award recognizes early-career researchers who have made outstanding contributions to the advancement of separation science.

The award was established in 2017 by Mrs. Lucienne Kováts and the Hungarian Society for Separation Sciences (HSSS) to honour the memory of Prof. Ervin sz. Kováts, a Hungarian-born chemist whose pioneering work laid the foundations of modern gas chromatography.

Dr. Tijmen S. Bos was selected for this distinction based on their PhD research, which has significantly advanced the development of innovative separation methodologies. Their work contributes to enhancing analytical performance and deepening the understanding of separation mechanisms in complex systems, a continuation of Prof. Kováts’s scientific legacy.

In acknowledging the award, gratitude goes to Prof. Govert Somsen, Prof. Peter Schoenmakers, Dr. Bob Pirok, and Dr. Leif Karlson for their supervision and mentorship, as well as to all colleagues and students who collaborated throughout their research. They also extended thanks to Mrs. Lucienne Kováts for making the award possible, and to Prof. Attila Felinger and Dr. Krisztián Horváth for presenting the medal and their kind recognition.

 

 

The recognition at the Balaton Symposium not only reflects Dr. Tijmen S. Bos his scientific achievements but also underscores their commitment to translating advanced analytical research into practical solutions for the wider scientific community.

At Innovative Data Evaluation and Separations (IDEAS), Dr. Tijmen S. Bos helps organizations turn complex analytical challenges into clear, actionable solutions. Drawing on expertise in data analysis, chromatographic separations, and polymer characterization, IDEAS combines academic rigor with practical insight to support innovation across research and industry.

IDEAS offers tailored consultancy and collaborative research support, ranging from the design of advanced data workflows to the development of new analytical methodologies. Services also include on-site and online training for industry, academic, and governmental laboratories seeking to strengthen their analytical capabilities.

With more than 25 peer-reviewed publications and experience supervising over 20 Master’s and PhD students, Tijmen S. Bos brings both deep scientific expertise and extensive experience in mentoring and applied problem-solving. What distinguishes IDEAS is the ability to deliver customized, innovative strategies, whether optimizing laboratory efficiency through automation, exploring novel analytical approaches, or equipping teams with targeted training.

Through IDEAS, the mission is clear: to empower clients to unlock the full potential of their data, methods, and research workflows.

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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.