Restek Proudly Supports Young Scientists at Germany’s 28th Annual Separation Science Working Group’s PhD Student Conference

Helping young scientists grow into the chromatographic industry’s next generation of innovators and leaders is an opportunity we relish at Restek.

For a company dedicated to the science of separation, it is invigorating to see the work of aspiring chromatographers, and there is no better place to see that than the annual PhD Student Conference hosted by the Separation Science Working Group, a part of the German Chemical Society (GDCh).

This year’s conference, located in Hohenroda, Germany was no exception.

Organized and led by students, the conference is a great opportunity for the attendees to network and exchange ideas. It’s also a valuable chance for companies to be introduced to the next generation of chromatographic talent! Recruiters from several international chemical companies like Dow Chemicals and BASF, as well as instrument suppliers like Agilent and Thermo used the opportunity to present open positions for young scientists.

This year’s conference featured sections on Food and the Environment, Bioanalyses, and the development of New Analytical Methods.

Drivers for new developments were the coupling of LC to Ion Mobility Spectrometry to enhance peak capacity for complex samples like biological materials or those found in petro chemistry, LC/ICP/MS methods for speciation analysis in biological matrices, and the miniaturization to Nano-LC, or a Lab-on-a-Chip approach.

For the first time, the organizers asked for two tutorials out of the industry. Restek was chosen to give one of them. The talk about “pro ezGC – Chromatogram modeling as a powerful tool for method development and in education” found a lot of interest, especially from University members involved in educating young students in separation science.

This was also Restek’s 12^th year presenting an award for the top three presentations delivered by PhD students, as voted on by the audience. Next to BGB and Springer Publishing we granted the young scientists with vouchers for Restek products, worth 1.500 €, 1.000 € and 500 € to support their woek is proud to announce this year’s award winners:

1. Sebastian Pallmann from Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich with his presentation about “Realization of Hadamar Transform Capillary Zone Electrophoresis on a standard and unmodified CE Instrument”
2. Kevin Eckey from the University of Münster with his presentation about “Studies about degradation Kinetics of Sulfamethoxazole under UV irradiation conditions”
3. Renata Gerhardt from University of Leipzig with her presentation about “A droplet-based interface for fractionation of on-chip separations and surface enhanced Raman detection”

We congratulate the winners and all of the participants of this year’s conference for their outstanding contributions to the science of chromatography.

We look forward to seeing familiar and new faces alike at next year’s PhD Student Conference!