Announcing... PEOPLE
Bringing emerging technology into the company As the head of one of 35 sections in Research and Development at Procter & Gamble, Thomas L. Chester deals with many of the responsibilities of all managers, such as staffing, budgets, and monthly reports. As a researcher, his job is also to bring emerging, critically needed technology into the company and show how it can be broadly applied to its many product lines. "I knew I had to be a scientist because the early space program made a big impression on me as a kid, and I liked science in general, anyway" says Chester. "In the early 1980s, my co-workers and I saw the tremendous opportunities provided by SFC's unique combination of features, such as universal detection for low volatility or labile solutes, that were not available in other chromatographies. About a third of our separation problems couldn't be solved with LC or GC, but many of these could be solved with SFC. At first our challenges focused on making SFC a useful and reliable technique. Today we're spendini? more effort developing methods and solving problems for people" One of the early obstacles to overcome was the interface between the column and the detector. "You have pressures of hundreds of atmospheres at the column outlet, but the detector usually works at ambient pressure. As the pressure drops in the interface, solutes can begin to precipitate. Some of early work was aimed at developing interfaces that don't cause mass transfer problems with flamebased detectors like the FID or with lowpressure detectors like the mass spectrometer." Chester's group has also developed a direct injection procedure that allows injection of samples about 10 times larger than those in previous open-tubular SFC techniques. Unlike more conventional procedures, the sample is not split during the injection process. Detection limits and precision are improved, and external standards can be used for calibration. "This has given us a big boost in our ability to solve analytical problems for our internal clients," says Chester. They're also trying to gain a better understanding of phase behavior and to ex-
tend SFC capabilities to solutes with higher molecular weight. "We spent quite some time studying fundamentals, like the mass transfer of liquid solvents injected into a supercritical fluid stream and the effects of increasing temperature and pressure well beyond the current practices. Using higher pressures than those provided on commercial instruments allows us to triple the range of solutes we can successfully separate and detect in some situations. We still don't know how far we can go."
Coblentz Award X. Sunney Xie, a researcher at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, will receive the 1996 Coblentz Award for outstanding achievement by a molecular spectroscopist under age 36. The award honors William W. Coblentz, whose work at the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST) led to the systematic use of IR spectroscopy for identifying and analyzing chemical compounds. It will be presented at the Ohio State University International Symposium on Molecular Spectroscopy in June. Xie is being honored for using near-field microscopy to study the dynamic behavior of single molecules His research is expected to have a major influence on the understanding of biochemical processes in biological membranes Other potentialfieldsof apolication include chemical analysis materials and the mappine' of biological structures
Free Enrollment in ACS Short Courses for Unemployed Members The ACS is pleased to provide this expanded career services program for unemployed members to help them upgrade their knowledge and improve their networking opportunities.
To obtain a calendar of upcoming courses, write or call the Department of Continuing Education, American Chemical Society, 1155 Sixteenth Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20036. Phone: (800)227-5558 or 202-872-4508.
Analytical Chemistry News & Features, February 1, 1996 85 A
