Multidimensional Champion

What triggered your interest in science and chemistry in particular?

I was born into a family of academicians – my father is a retired university history professor, and my mother (also retired now) was a high school principal –so learning was very much part of growing up. From a very young age, I was dismantling things to find out what was inside and how they worked, including my father’s Seiko watch and Toshiba radio...  And the neighborhood pharmacist impressed me; I liked the fact that he was not an MD but was able to provide “chemicals” to cure people’s ailments. So “pharmacist” was on my list of things I might aspire to in later life. I was also interested in agronomy and how you could improve crops like onions and corn. Everything I was interested in related back to science or applied science – there was never any doubt in my mind where my passions lay.

Why did you go into teaching?

My father was a reservoir of information; you could ask him anything. I was always impressed with his ability to gain vast knowledge and transfer it. And my mother, as the high school principal, was managing an educational institution. I admired my parents greatly for their mission to mentor the next generation. And even though they trained in America and in Europe, they went back to Africa. My father said it was because he wanted to teach the children of his school friends; the connection made teaching more meaningful. His words have stayed with me. When I had the opportunity to teach at Spelman College, I thought about what he said.

You’ll have noticed that people who look like me are in the minority at the conferences we all attend. Indeed, I’d often tell my students that 90 percent of the conferences I go to, I am the only person who looks like me. By the time I retire, I would like to have made a small dent on that problem. My mission involves getting more people who look like me into science and into the areas in which I work. If it happens in my lifetime, I’ll know that some of my work has been for a greater good; there is no reason for a discrepancy in the numbers of people participating in science. It’s not a matter of ability, I think interests and conventions need altering. Today, the problems we tackle are worldwide. Whether it’s global warming, food production, or health surveillance, we need global solutions and expertise.

You were clearly a great promoter for the college...

I’ve been in many dissertation committees around the world and it’s a pleasure to introduce the concept of schools like Spelman College to my colleagues. My motto was: “bring the world to Spelman College and export Spelman College to the world.” For example, the workshop I organized and taught during the second ever GC×GC conference took place in one of my classrooms. People who are now leaders in the field, such as Peter Tranchida, attended it. Altogether, I had 24 students who are now leading lights in GC×GC. Philip Marriott, for example, came over from Australia for that conference. I gave him the tour of my operation and he bought a coffee cup with the Spelman logo. Years later, he broke it, so I sent him another one; he said it’s a cup he enjoys using in his own office. Professors like Emanuele Boselli from Italy visited; in fact, he stayed for a three-month sabbatical and later sent one of his graduate students who also spent three months with us. I was able to bring many people to Spelman.

A thing to note is that Spelman is for undergraduates only and we take on about 20 students in each department each year. There is no graduate school. This posed a problem for me because the system was not equipped to handle the types of things I wanted to do at the advanced research and development level. For example, we could not afford to pay a post-doc to help me with my research, as the college does not have a salary mechanism like the bigger institutions such as Georgia Tech or Emory. However, I did manage to find a workaround solution. Right next door to Spelman is Clark Atlanta University and I became an adjunct professor there. I had a graduate student from Brazil (Leiliane Amorim) who was fully funded by a CAPES fellowship who wanted to come to Spelman to do her PhD work with me, but unfortunately, Spelman could not authorize a visa. Fortunately, I was able to go to the chair of the department at Clark and ask him to complete the paperwork. She came for a full year and we published a paper in the Journal of Chromatography A (1). I still see her at the Riva conference.

Why do you think the college is so important?

It’s a place where students with similar ethnicity can gain academic preparation and build the confidence they need before moving on to graduate school and beyond. They see that there are many people like them, who are just as smart as they are, and they can share similar career and life aspirations. When they go back into the world as part of a minority, they have a network of friends from Spelman they can lean on. In a racially biased society, it’s nice to have that sort of blanket or oasis; perhaps one day, the concept of Spelman will become obsolete. But we’ll have to wait for the biases in society to disappear first...

What was your most precious moment as a teacher?

I was working on a method development for drugs in hair with a student called Miranda Hallett (who went on to complete her PhD in bioanalytical chemistry). We were making such good progress on the Friday, she did not want to stop. Spending that Saturday with her in the lab was wonderful because it was her idea; she simply wanted to get the work done. She was a phenomenal student and Spelman suited her. Miranda presented the project at an American Chemical Society meeting. I was sitting next to an old colleague from NASA who, in the middle of her presentation, turned to me and said, “I thought you told me that Spelman College was only for undergraduates? That’s a graduate student up there!” That was the level of confidence our students had in presenting their results and work with others. In the 13 years I worked at Spelman, I mentored 86 students and each one is a story – and those are my proudest moments.

What are you doing at the FDA?

I’m the director of the tobacco branch. I manage a group of scientists charged with developing new methods for tobacco regulation in line with President Obama’s “Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act”. Obama wants the level of harmful and addictive chemicals in tobacco products to be controlled to the best of the abilities of the companies making them. This is a unique opportunity for me and my team to bring in advanced technology, such as multidimensional GC and LC, radical sample preparation and detection techniques and software, for a new generation of methods for targeted and non-targeted analysis. It’s a challenge that I am looking forward to accomplishing. As you know, GC×GC has been around for nearly 25 years, and yet there is always a question about when is it going to take off. I sometimes say it suffers from “Anna Kournikova Syndrome” – very attractive but lacking consistency for long-term success. GC×GC chromatograms look great – people can’t get enough of their beauty or the technology – but it has not really made it into routine analysis. Somehow, there are lingering questions about it.

How can its reputation be improved?

From my vantage point, although GC×GC has been demonstrated in many applications – environmental, food, bioanalysis, petroleum, industrial and so on – method validation has not been rigorous enough. In other words, GC×GC has been shown to be a better technique in proof-of-concept studies and in publications. But that’s all. It hasn’t stood the test of the validation process. When you run 10,000 samples in the same instrument, you need to know the day-to-day coefficient of variations. What is the reproducibility for the same compound? How accurate is quantitation? In fact, the only regulated GC×GC method I know of is by Eric Reiner at the Ontario Ministry of Environment in Canada. His method uses GC×GC-electron capture detector (ECD) for organohalogen compounds. Now, the good thing is that we know GC×GC will work – we just need to demonstrate it. So I am going to take my skill as an emerging technologies leader and combine it with the need for routine regulatory analytical work to develop this new era of methods that are not only better but also validated. It’s very exciting and I am going to be looking for the best talent to expand our team of 22 to 65 over the next three years.