Emily Hilder and Derek Stevenson Awarded Jubilee Medal at HPLC 2016

Emily Hilder and Derek Stevenson were awarded the Jubilee Medal by the Chromatographic Society at HPLC 2016 in San Francisco, California, USA.   Professor Emily Hilder is currently the Director of the University of South Australia’s Future Industries Institute in Adelaide, Australia.   Emily obtained a BSc in Chemistry and Mathematics and PhD in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Tasmania; she completed her PhD in 2001. Emily then undertook postdoctoral positions at the Johannes Kelper University (Austria), E.O. Lawrence Berkley National Laboratories, University of California, Berkeley (USA), and the University of Tasmania. She was promoted to the post of Senior Lecturer at the University of Tasmania in 2008 and then Professor of Chemistry in 2011. She was also Director of the Australian Research Council Training Centre for Portable Analytical Separation Technologies at the University of Tasmania. In January 2016 Emily moved to her present role at the University of South Australia.   Emily’s current research interests are the design and synthesis of polymeric monolithic capillary phases for liquid chromatography (LC) and capillary electrochromatography (CEC), and electrophoresis. She has also recently explored miniaturization in chromatography, new media for dried blood spot analysis, and the potential of chromatographic and electrophoretic techniques to obtain unique selectivity for the analysis of ionic analytes using CEC.    She also developed a unique analytical method to screen heparin for potentially lethal impurities, which was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and was also part of the development team on the ACROSS bomb-detection project.   Emily has published more than 100 manuscripts in refereed journals and has presented about the same amount of lectures at international scientific conferences. She was presented with the Emerging Leader in Chromatography Award from LCGC North America in 2012.   Dr. Derek Stevenson is currently Head of Robens Analytical Unit, which is based at the University of Surrey, Surrey, UK, where he has been involved in over 40 extensive projects for major companies, including Pfizer, ICI Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, Pharmachemie, British Telecom, and the World Health Organization (WHO).   Derek obtained his PhD in Bioanalytical Chemistry in 1981 at the University of Surrey and began working at the Wolfson Bioanalytical Centre, which is now part of the Robens institute. He has also worked as a Senior Lecturer in Analytical Chemistry. The main emphasis of his research has been the analysis of drugs, metabolites, and endogenous compounds in biological fluids using LC and gas chromatography (GC). He has developed simplified methods to monitor trace organics for environmental and occupational applications. Derek has also investigated the selectivity of molecular imprinted polymers for sample preparation and the miniaturization of chromatography systems.   Derek is a Fellow of the Chromatographic Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and was awarded the Analytical Separations Medal by the Royal Society Chemistry (RSC) in 2007 for research into sample preparation, chiral separations, immunoaffinity extraction, and bioanalysis.

   The Jubilee Medal was established in 1982 to mark the 25th anniversary of the Chromatographic Society (ChromSoc) and has a rich history of esteemed separation scientists associated with it. The medal is awarded to up-and-coming separation scientists who have made major use of separation science in their own field, or to scientists who have made meritorious contributions to a particular area of separation science.