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Professor Wolfgang Lindner
- In Conversation with Chromatography Today
For this issue’s instalment of our occasional interviews with Chromatographic Society medallists and other leaders in the field of separation science we feature not just any Chromatographic Society medallist but, up until this year at least, a unique one. When, following on from a Jubilee Medal in 1991, Wolfgang Lindner was awarded the Society’s Martin Medal in 2009 he became the first person to have been awarded both medals. Strangely, the first “emerging separation scientist” to have been deemed to have actually emerged!
Of his many outstanding contributions to the field of separation science he is best known for his research work, and teaching, in the area of chiral resolution, for example products from his group having been commercialised as the ULMO, QDAX and QNAX chiral stationary phases (CSPs). He first became involved in chromatography during his PhD studies at the Karl-Franzens University of Graz looking at the gas chromatographic analysis of toxins in tobacco smoke. In 1972 he accepted an assistant professor position at the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Graz, rising through the ranks to associate professor in 1982. During these years, he worked as scientist-on-leave in a number of industrial and academic laboratories -1973 and 1975 in the group of Prof. Roland Frei at Sandoz, Basel; 1978–1979 as a Max Kade post-doctoral fellow in the group of the legendary Prof. Barry Karger at Northeastern University, Boston, USA; and 1986–1987 as an invited international chemist with Dr. F. Robey at the FDA, Bethesda, USA to explore new research perspectives.
Wolfgang Lindner at ISC 2012 in Torun, Poland, shortly before his official retirement)
Laboratory for Molecular Recognition Materials at the Universities Department of Analytical Chemistry and Food Chemistry.
Commercialised chiral anion-exchange phases developed by Lindner: use in hydro-organic mobile phases, in polar organic mode and in SFC; give enantiomer separations for derivatised amino acids, acidic drugs and metabolites, phenols, hydroxycarboxylic acids, arylcarboxylic acids, aryloxycarboxylic acids, sulphonic acids, phosphonic acids and many other chiral organic acids
In 1996, he received and accepted the call to the prestigious chair of Analytical Chemistry at the University of Vienna, as successor of the late Prof. Josef Huber, working as part of the Christian Doppler
Having officially retired at the tail-end of 2012, Lindner has seemed to manage to still keep himself very busy, amongst other things being heavily involved, as Honorary Chair, in the organisation of ISC 2014 which will take place in Salzburg between September 14th and 17th this year. Happily he did find time though to chat to Chromatography Today not only to reflect on his distinguished career but also to muse on the current status of separation science.
Many of the early chromatographers started off as physical chemists and, later, many got into it via applications. You started off in chromatography doing GC of toxins in tobacco at Graz. Was Graz your local university? Did you start off as a chemist? Were you an aspiring chromatographer who happened to work
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