Winners of the 2015 LCGC Chromatography Awards To Be Honored in Pittcon Symposium

LCGC, the leading resource for separation scientists, is proud to announce that Joseph Jack Kirkland and Caroline West are the winners of the eighth annual LCGC Lifetime Achievement and Emerging Leader in Chromatography Awards, respectively. Kirkland and West will be honored in a symposium as part of the technical program at the Pittcon 2015 conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, on Monday, March 9, 2015. This will mark the first time that the LCGC awards are included in the Pittcon technical program.

The Lifetime Achievement Award

The Lifetime Achievement in Chromatography award honors a seasoned professional for a lifetime of contributions to the advancement of chromatographic techniques and applications.

Kirkland, the 2015 winner, received AB and MS degrees from Emory University and his PhD in analytical chemistry from the University of Virginia in 1953. After working at DuPont for 40 years and retiring as a DuPont Fellow, he was a co-initiator of high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) businesses, and is now vice-president of research and development at Advanced Materials Technology, Inc., of Wilmington, Delaware.

Kirkland is one of the original pioneers of modern liquid chromatography and has made many substantial contributions to the development of HPLC since its inception in the 1960s. Highlights among his contributions include the development of the first spherical packing designed specifically for modern HPLC; the development of siloxane bonded phases; establishing processes for manufacturing spherical, small-particle (5-μm) totally porous packings that introduced a major leap forward in the performance of HPLC columns; the development of acid- and temperature-stable, sterically protected bonded phases; development of the first small, superficially porous particles for separating high-molecular-weight molecules such as synthetic organic polymers and natural proteins; and introducing very small (2.7-μm) core–shell particles to enable ultrahigh-pressure liquid chromatography (UHPLC)-like performance of separations run at HPLC pressures. 

Kirkland also developed, along with Jurgen Kohler, the first “type B” silica support, which vastly reduced the acidity of silica surfaces and thereby improved the HPLC of basic compounds. In collaboration with Wallace Yau, Kirkland developed the concept of using bimodal pore size packing materials for performing size-exclusion chromatography over four orders of magnitude in solute size.

Kirkland has coauthored eight books, published more than 160 papers, been awarded 36 patents, and taught more than 5000 students for the American Chemical Society.  He has received many international awards for his work, including the ACS Award in Chromatography, DuPont’s Lavoisier Medal, the Swedish Tobern Bergman Medal, the A.J.P. Martin Chromatography Medal and a DSc from Emory University.

The Emerging Leader Award

The Emerging Leader in Chromatography Award recognizes the achievements and aspirations of a talented young separation scientist who has made strides early in his or her career toward the advancement of chromatographic techniques and applications.

West, the 2015 winner, is an associate professor of analytical chemistry the University of Orleans in France, where she she is a part of a very active research group. Her scientific interests lie in fundamentals of chromatographic selectivity, mainly in supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC), but also in HPLC. Her work is essentially devoted to improving the understanding of chromatographic separations to facilitate method development.

She is the author of approximately 50 papers in peer-reviewed journals, including an influential review on graphitic carbon stationary phases, a significant paper that unravelled retention mechanisms in the HILIC mode, and the development of a useful classification of stationary phases devoted to SFC.

The original unified classification of stationary phases that West developed is based a large set of results she accumulated, and can be applied to either HPLC or SFC. Her classification is a five-dimensional one, based on the five coefficients of the linear solvation energy relationship model that she calculated for 100 solutes and over 70 stationary phases, divided into three groups: nonpolar, polar, and aromatic. This nearly exhaustive classification helps analysts choose the stationary phase best suited to perform a new separation. This work has been called the most important contribution to the improvement of our knowledge of SFC separations made in the last 10 years. It combines an excellent fundamental understanding of the thermodynamics of separations and a great practical usefulness.