Pat Sandra

Meet Pat Sandra

The decade’s most important development? The range of developments in mass spectrometry has been enormous in the last decade and has introduced analytical performance in all areas and for all disciplines that were unthinkable ten years ago.

Most exciting development or trend? As an emerged trend, I would like to mention the growing awareness of and interest in the importance of good sample preparation. More and more automated systems (robots) for different matrices and targets are described in the recent literature and are offered commercially. Much better precision, accuracy, reproducibility, ruggedness and instrumental performance are achieved by reducing or even eliminating human actions in the sample preparation step. Moreover, by optimizing and miniaturizing the sample preparation step, an important contribution is also made to the greening of analytical chemistry.

Controversial opinion? A quote without comment: there are far too many journals and far too many meetings in our field.