Peter Schoenmakers Receives Dal Nogare Award at Pittcon 2019

Peter Schoenmakers, a professor of analytical chemistry at the University of Amsterdam, received the Chromatography Forum of the Delaware Valley Dal Nogare Award on Monday, March 18, at Pittcon 2019, in Philadelphia Pennsylvania. The Chromatography Forum of the Delaware Valley chooses award recipients based on their contributions to the fundamental understanding of the chromatographic process. The Dal Nogare Award was established in 1972 in honor of Stephen Dal Nogare, who was one of the founders of the Chromatography Forum and its second president. Schoenmakers is the 47^th awardee to receive this prestigious award.

Schoenmakers received his master’s degree in chemical engineering from the Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands, and did his PhD research with Prof. Leo de Galan in Delft and with Prof. Barry Karger in Boston, Massachusetts. His current research focuses on analytical separations in general and on multidimensional liquid chromatography in particular. In 2016, Schoenmakers was awarded a European Research Council advanced grant, worth 2.5 million euros, for the project “Separation Technology for A Million Peaks” (STAMP). The project aims to demonstrate the viability of spatial two-dimensional and three-dimensional liquid chromatography and to confirm the notion that these techniques may yield peak capacities exceeding 50,000 and 500,000, respectively.

Schoenmakers is the director of the van‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Science at the University of Amsterdam, and the education director of COAST, The Netherlands’ public-private partnership organization on analytical chemistry. He is also a member of the editorial advisory boards of LCGC North America and LCGC Europe and an editor of the Journal of Chromatography A.

Among the recent international awards Schoenmakers has won are the CASSS Award (2015), the Csaba Horváth Memorial Award (2015), the John H. Knox Medal of the UK’s Royal Society of Chemistry (Belgium, 2014), the Martin medal of the Chromatographic Society of the UK (2011), and the EAS Award for Excellence in Separation Science (2010).

After the award presentation, Schoenmakers gave a talk on comprehensive multidimensional liquid chromatography. He explained how, when performed correctly, comprehensive two-dimensional liquid chromatography (LC) offers a much greater separation power than does conventional one-dimensional LC and how, ultimately, spatial three-dimensional LC will be very attractive for the efficient separation of extremely attractive for the efficient separation of extremely complex samples.