Could you give us an introduction to your background and career journey?
I began my career back in 1983 by engaging with professionals within the industry, research institutions and academia. Most of these years were spent gaining practical experience in analytical chemistry, specifically gas chromatography. In 1992, I moved to the US to pursue a PhD with the late Georges A. Guiochon at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. During this time, I studied HPLC column heterogeneity using a variety of detection techniques.
How do you reflect on your time – close to three decades – at Phenomenex?
I joined Phenomenex as a senior research scientist in 1997. It was a great opportunity for me to take up a position in a young and dynamic company with a healthy work culture, a wealth of success-driven employees and minimal internal politics. The president, Fasha Mahjoor, ensured that our working atmosphere stayed conducive to success across many decades. Fasha was always open to new ideas and initiatives and ready to provide funding to many of them. Owing to its dedication to customer support, a culture of innovation, and the hard work of many of its employees, Phenomenex quickly succeeded in asserting itself as a leading product supplier for chromatography.
For several decades, the R&D department at Phenomenex has been extremely productive. Numerous new products have been launched each year for HPLC, GC, SPE and preparative LC applications. Our teamwork was excellent, perhaps as we collectively considered ourselves not as geniuses, but rather soldiers – all dedicated to the common cause. Emmet Welch – a home-grown chromatographer and our R&D director at the time – kept the team aligned and focused on delivering new products.
Given the limited access that a company of our size had to online journals, scientific meetings and new instrumentation, I think we performed well, all things considered.
What were some of the major challenges you faced during your time at Phenomenex in driving new innovation?
I started my career at Phenomenex by studying HPLC column packing technology. It’s an important element of column manufacturing, and anyone who’s well-versed in the technology can appreciate the difficulties that are associated with it. Industry competitors keep relevant knowledge to themselves, and therefore very little of it is published (apart from sections included in patents, perhaps). This knowledge is kept as trade secret for good reason; the livelihood of these companies depends on their essential knowhow, which has to be safeguarded. On the flipside, the lack of healthy exchange on any aspects of science and technology will always be a sizable impediment to progress.
My following role was to manage the analytical support of new product development – selecting, designing and implementing the most informative tests for the new product candidates. The historical tests – proposed mostly from chromatographic literature – may have performed well at the standards of their time, but were long overdue an update considering how far the field had come. Again, some of this work on new column characterization has never been published, for the reasons aforementioned.
I was appointed as a research managing scientist in 2007, where I was responsible for overseeing most new product development projects. I held this position until my retirement from Phenomenex in early 2024. One of the most challenging projects I was involved in was the development of the Kinetex line of HPLC columns – one of the most recognized brands in our industry, in my opinion. Along with Waters Corporation’s Acquity line of HPLC columns, I regard Kinetex as one of the most significant developments in UHPLC. While it was a huge group effort, my former colleagues Michael Chitty and Zhengfei Sun were the major contributors to the development of Kinetex. The product line closest to my heart, however, is the Lux family of polysaccharide-based chiral HPLC columns. I spent more than a decade working with my good friend Professor Bezhan Chankvetadze on its development and promotion; and following my retirement it’s remained a hobby for me – I still assist my former company with Lux as a consultant.
Do industry scientists – in contrast to academics – face greater challenges when it comes to making significant scientific contributions?
Overall, I’ve found working in industries that serve pharmaceutical, environmental, forensic or food analysis to be quite rewarding. It’s been very satisfying to know that our products contribute to the availability of essential medicines and information on our environment and food safety.
Comparing industry to academia, it’s fair to say both worlds have their own share of challenges. Scientists in industry work exclusively on unmet needs, with limited bandwidth to work on “pet projects.” Furthermore, we’re restricted to the pursuit of specific innovations that are essential to progress or commercial success; there’s no option to walk away from a project if it seems too difficult. On top of all this, limited dialogue with industry peers or academia makes industrial research quite a challenging task, as previously mentioned.
Do you feel industry scientists are sometimes overshadowed by their academic counterparts?
Yes, industrial scientists are often overshadowed by academia – and for the wrong reasons too.
I personally have experienced occasions of neglect. The most distressing of these were instances when our company developed excellent new products, which were then handed over to third parties. These parties then got to present and publish our products, and our achievements, and receive praise as if they were theirs. Simultaneously, when presented by the inventing team the same information was often received mildly, or with reservations. I found this unfair and the reservations unjustified.
My view on the situation is this: some academic publications have disciples who may or may not confirm the published results. Compared to commercial products, only a limited number of academic publications are subject to scrutiny; most conclusions are rarely contested. No matter the claims from the inventing company, their new product will be evaluated by hundreds of analysts, who’ll decide for themselves if the product is truly worthy of incorporating into their analytical workflows – now that’s scrutiny! With this in mind, I wonder: why not allow the inventors to flaunt their achievements, knowing that the day of reckoning is soon to come?
During your career in industry, what are your big innovation lessons learned?
Just like academia, industrial development is limited by resources. With livelihoods at stake, companies cannot afford to waste too much on failed projects. For this reason, no matter how promising they seem, companies have to be cautious when pursuing new ideas. Any great idea needs champions within the company, otherwise leadership will not believe it’s worth taking a risk on.
It’s for this reason that scientists working in industry have to be the champions of their own ideas. They should look to sell them internally – whenever the front door is slammed shut, they should look to sneak in through the back. My advice to younger industrial researchers is to be evangelists in your ideas, right up to the very end when the project is completed.
Tivadar Farkas will be presented with the Uwe D. Neue Award in Separation Science – created to recognize industrial scientists that have made and continue to make significant contributions to the field of separation science – at HPLC 2025
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