Session Date: Tuesday, November 19, in the morning session
Presentation Title: Orthogonal Separations
Sponsored by Agilent Technologies
Biography:
Mark R. Schure received his undergraduate education at Northeastern University and his Ph.D. in atmospheric chemistry from Colorado State University. Following two years of post-doctoral study at the University of Utah with Prof. J. C. Giddings, he entered industry in the science group at Digital Equipment Corporation in Marlborough, Massachusetts in 1984. In 1989, Dr. Schure moved to the Computational Chemistry group at the Rohm and Haas Company (now The Dow Chemical Company), where he was a Distinguished Scientist and director of the Theoretical Separation Science Laboratory. He left in 2012 to form a consulting company, Kroungold Analytical, for commercial separation product development.
His scientific interests include the fundamental separation science of complex molecules, polymers and colloids, colloid chemistry and materials science, and all aspects of solving large-scale chemical and physical problems with computers. His contributions to separation science include detailed theory, simulations and experimental investigations in the areas of 2D chromatography, chromatographic mechanism, capillary electrophoresis and field-flow fractionation.
Dr. Schure developed the theory of sampling in 2D chromatography, which relates the rate at which the first dimension column must be sampled by the second column without degrading the separation process. Other works in 2D chromatography include quantifying resolution in multiple dimensions, developing the theory of detection limits and defining method development processes. A quantitative definition of “orthogonal separations” using the fractal dimension has been developed to characterize chromatographic performance and aid in methods development for 1D, 2D and n-D chromatography.
One of the holy grails of both gas and liquid chromatography is to calculate retention factors, given the stationary phase, solute and solvent. In 1999 Schure and Ilja Siepmann conducted an NSF-funded modeling study where retention indices were accurately computed using advanced molecular simulation methods for GC. This was followed by a series of simulation studies of increasing complexity leading to the elucidation of the retention mechanism of alkanes and alcohols in reversed-phase liquid chromatography (RPLC) published in 2007. These simulation studies showed excellent agreement with experiment allowing for a detailed molecular picture of the RPLC process, which has been long-needed in chromatographic research.
Dr. Schure has received the Arthur Doolittle award from the PMSE (Polymeric Materials Science and Engineering) Division of the ACS in 1991 and the Northeastern University Distinguished Alumni Lecture award in 1993. He received the Douglas Leng award within The Dow Chemical Company for basic research in Engineering Sciences in 2011 and the L. S. Palmer award from the Minnesota Chromatography Forum in 2012.
Since 1995 Dr. Schure has been an Adjunct Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Delaware. He was the chairman of the HPLC 2004 conference in Philadelphia and has been a co-chairman of the ISPPP (International Symposium on the Separation of Proteins, Peptides and Polynucleotides) conference series in the United States. He has published over 100 papers, 4 patents and recently edited the book “Multidimensional Liquid Chromatography” in 2009.