The Potential of Portable LC Instruments: An HTC-18 Interview with Brett Paull

At HTC-18 in Leuven, Executive Editor of LCGC International, Alasdair Matheson, spoke to Brett Paull from the University of Tasmania and HyTECH about his talk entitled: “Analytical Performance and Disruptive Potential of Fully Portable Portable and Field Deployable LC–MS Technology.”

Professor Brett Paull is a University of Plymouth (UK) B.Sc. (Hons), Ph.D. (1994) and D.Sc. (2013) graduate, in the fields of environmental and (bio)analytical chemistry. Brett is a Professor of Analytical Chemistry within the School of Natural Sciences, at the University of Tasmania (UTAS), and Director of the ARC Training Centre for Hyphenated Analytical Separation Technologies (HyTECH). Prior to his current role, Brett simultaneously held the positions as Director of the Australian Centre for Research on Separation Science (ACROSS - 2014–2019), and Director of the ARC Training Centre for Portable Analytical Separation Technologies (ASTech - 2015–2019).

Brett Paull of the University of Tasmania. | Photo Credit: Alasdair Matheson

Brett has a produced more than 390 publications, including over 300 refereed journal articles, cited over 12,000 times. He is coauthor of two Royal Society of Chemistry published research monographs, ‘High-performance chelation ion chromatography’ and ‘3D Printing in the Chemical Sciences’. Brett has supervised to completion a total of 52 higher degree by research students (49 PhDs).

In this video interview, Paull discusses the following topics:

• Is there a demand for portable instruments generally at the moment?
• Why is there a need for portable LC instruments in particular?
• What have been the main advances in terms of the evolution of portable
  LC instruments? Have there been any major drawbacks in these portable
  instruments that prevented them becoming “mainstream”?
• Your team recently published a paper entitled “Compact Capillary HPLC Systems for Pharmaceutical On-line reaction Monitoring." Can you elaborate on the advantages of a compact system for this application?
• What other applications could this system potential be useful for?
• How do you see portable LC instruments evolving in the future, and for what types of application?
• Can you tell us more about the new training centre you opened?