Fabrice Gritti
Principal Consulting Scientist, Waters Corporation, USA
Qualities of an innovative thinker? To be able to bridge unsolved critical practical problems from today and all disciplines of fundamental physics and chemistry.
Making the most out of your invention… Any invention or innovation must be exposed to the application field at an early research stage for direct feedback in order to refine its development and guarantee its successful impact.
Picking a problem… The problems to be tackled are those limiting the speed, accuracy, robustness, and the ease-of-use of current analytical methods in the field.
The decade’s most important development? In the past decade, we have seen very important technological breakthroughs in mass spectrometers for the charge/mass detection of compounds of biological interests with masses larger than 1 MDa. This opens up new opportunities for the characterization of new bio-medicines.
Biggest challenge facing the field? One important challenge concerns the huge amount of data to be collected and processed by the artificial intelligence algorithms used to boost accuracy, speed, and performance of future analytical tools.
Most exciting development or trend? The application of artificial intelligence to design faster and more efficient technical solutions to the field are exciting. One wonders where they will stand in ten years from today.
Missing from the toolbox? Separations techniques are still struggling to properly handle the analysis of complex mixtures containing very large biomolecules such as mRNA or ssDNA. This calls for breakthrough separation techniques.
Controversial opinion? It is marginal, yet, it concerns the impact of particle size distribution in packed columns on efficiency in liquid chromatography. Tightening this distribution does not lead to better resolution columns. However, there is still this ghost thinking in the community believing the opposite despite prior experimental and simulation proofs. It is not clear how this myth was born and still supported today by both academic and industry leaders.
Book for scientists? Quantum Electrodynamics: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman demonstrates that the most sophisticated theory in science can be understood by the layperson using everyday language, humoristic tone, and simple visuals.
