Professor Nobuo Tanaka: Winner of the 2014 Chromatographic Society Martin Medal

Each September The Chromatographic Society executive committee convenes to discuss the award of our Jubilee and Martin medals for the following year. The Martin medal is named after Professor A.J.P. Martin who in 1978 gave permission for his name to be associated with this award. The 'Martin Medal' is the highest honour the Society confers and is awarded to scientists who have made outstanding contributions to the advancement of separation science.

The nominations for this medal category for 2014 were extremely strong as usual and included a number of highly prominent separation scientists. Accordingly, there was significant deliberation by the committee in the Martin medal category to ensure the most appropriate candidates were chosen for the award. On this occasion, the breadth and depth of the evidence pointed to one outstanding candidate. Accordingly, Professor Nobuo Tanaka (Kyoto Institute of Technology and GL Sciences, Tokyo) was awarded the Martin Medal.
Professor Tanaka’s research is truly multidisciplinary. His work spans research on highly selective stationary phases, isotope separation and separations based on isotopic chirality, separation mechanism elucidation, multidimensional separations and biological separations. He contributed to the development of the monolithic silica rod column which was commercialised by Merck in 2000 and is widely used in the bioanalysis field. Other notable areas of research include his seminal work on pressure induced retention changes in RPLC, stationary phase characterisation and he was also a major contributor in the area of monolithic silica capillary columns for LC and CEC at the turn of the century.
Professor Tanaka undertook his PhD in the Faculty of Science at Kyoto University in 1973 where he also undertook his undergraduate and MSc studies. Between 1973 and 1979, Professor Tanaka undertook a number of post-doctoral research positions in the USA with Professor E. R. Thornton (University of Pennsylvania), Professor Y. Pocker (University of Washington) and Professor B. L. Karger (Northeastern University). After his time abroad, he returned to a position at the Kyoto Institute of Technology (KIT). In 1987 he was made an Associate Professor and a full Professor in 1991. He held this position until he retired in March 2009. He was awarded Professor Emeritus by KIT and joined GL Sciences Inc., Iruma, Saitama near Tokyo to continue research on separation science. Currently he is visiting UC Davis Metabolomics Center, CA, USA, and will be working there until summer 2014.
His research is internationally acclaimed and he has received numerous awards reflecting his outstanding contribution. These include the Award of the Society for Chromatographic Sciences (1998), The Chromatographic Society Jubilee Medal (2002), the Japan Society for Analytical Chemistry Award (2004), the Marcel Golay Award (2007), the ACS Award for Chromatography (2009) and the Prize for Science and Technology from The Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan (2010).
Professor Tanaka’s scientific expertise is also highly valued and recognised by the learned press. He is currently editor or serving on the editorial boards for Chromatography, Chromatographia, Chinese Journal of Chromatography, Journal of Separation Science and the Journal of Chromatography A. As an author, he has over 210 publications including 50 book chapters and review articles.
Professor Tanaka was a permanent scientific committee member for the HPLC conference series between 2007 and 2011. He was the Chairman for HPLC Kyoto in 2001, and the 33rd International Symposium on High Performance Liquid Phase Separations and Related Techniques in Kyoto (2008). It is anticipated that Professor Tanaka will be presented with the Martin Medal at HPLC2014 in New Orleans in May 2014 upon agreement of the organising committee.

Professor Michael Lämmerhofer: Winner of the
2014 Chromatographic Society Jubilee Medal
Professor Michael Lämmerhofer of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Tübingen has been awarded the 2014 Chromatographic Society Jubilee medal for his important contribution to the development of chromatographic science.
The Jubilee medal was instituted in 1982 to mark the 25th anniversary of the Society and has a prestigious history of separation scientists associated with it. The medal is awarded to up-and-coming separation scientists, those who have made major use of separation science in their own field or to scientists who have made meritorious contributions to a particular area of separation science.
The broad range of his research - from the development of functionalised separation materials (in particular chiral stationary phases) through to bioanalytical separations in the field of metabolomics and plasmid DNA analysis, and latterly the analysis of oxidative stress markers is indicative of the wide impact he has made in field of analytical chemistry. This work has resulted in his strong presence in the peer-reviewed scientific literature and prominence as a speaker at international separation science meetings. All these aspects were recognised by The Chromatographic Society in the award of the Jubilee medal.
Professor Lämmerhofer obtained his PhD at the University of Graz in Austria in 1996 under the guidance of Professor Wolfgang Lindner. Upon completion of his doctorate, he stayed as a researcher at Graz before moving to the Department of Analytical Chemistry, University of Vienna. In 1999, he undertook a one year post-doctoral position at the Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley with Professor’s. Jean Fréchet and Frantisek Šveč researching novel polymeric chromatographic supports. After his year in the US, Michael returned to Vienna and in 2002 was promoted to Associate Professor. He continued to his research and teaching at Vienna until 2011 when he moved to the University of Tübingen in Germany where he is a Full Professor for Pharmaceutical (Bio)Analysis.
To date, Professor Lämmerhofer has published over 140 peer-reviewed papers and holds 7 patents. His research index rating (h-index) is 34 which is extremely impressive at this stage in his career. It is anticipated that Professor Lämmerhofer will be formally presented with the Jubilee medal at a major international conference next year.