Prof. Phyllis Brown

"CHROMATOGRAPHIC JOURNEY; PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE"

Abstract:

The tremendous pace of the development of sensitive, reliable, rapid analytical techniques has been unprecedented in the history of science. In the early 1970s HPLC and its reversed phase mode opened new horizons in biochemistry and medicine and paved the way for the biotechnology era. Without HPLC and a little later CE, the analyses of DNA' composition, its free constituents and it related amino acids were very difficult and time consuming; thus the human genome project would have taken many more years to complete. In addition we would not have been able to produce all the drugs on the market today nor to assess their purity as rigorously.

In my talk I will trace some of the developments that took place in my lifetime in separation science that made possible the great advances in the development of drugs and the treatment of diseases. The question now is what are the future requirements in pharmaceutical and other scientific laboratories? Can we predict how separations will be done in the next decade or two? Have HPLC and CE reached a plateau or will they be replaced by other techniques? Finally will all analyses be performed on the nanoscale and/or will all assays be done on a microchip?

Biography:

Dr. Brown received her B.S. in Chemistry from the George Washington University (Washington,D.C.) and her PhD in Chemistry from Brown University (Providence, R.I.).

She did postdoctoral work in the Section of Pharmacology at Brown and later joined the faculty as an assistant research professor. In 1973 she became an assistant professor at the University of Rhode Island and was promoted to full professor in 1980. She recently retired and is now professor emeritus.  She wrote the first book on the applications of HPLC to biochemical and biomedical research and she co-authored the first book on reversed phase HPLC (RPLC). Both books were translated into Japanese. She also co-authored one of the first books in which HPLC was compared to CE. She recognized the great potential of RPLC for biomedical work and was an authority on the RPLC separations of nucleic acid constituents, She investigated the mechanisms of RPLC retention of purine and pyrimidine compounds and together with Dr. Eli Grushka, formulated rules which can be used to predict retention behavior of the biologically important molecules. By developing quantitative structure -retention relationships, these rules can be used to characterize the structures of unknown purine or pyrimidine moieties in biological samples and she established a range of normal values for these compounds in blood fluids.  Dr. Brown has been on the editorial boards of Analytical Chemistry, Journal of Liquid Chromatography, Journal of Chromatographic Science, LC.GC magazine and Jourrnal of Chromatography, Biomedical Applications She has been a regular reviewer for these journals as well as for Clinical Chemistry, the ACS Petroleum Research Fund, and NSF. For ten years she was the URI representative on the editorial board of the University Press of New England and was the chairman of the URI editorial committee for the press.  Dr. Brown is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi, and Phi Kappa Phi. In 1984 she was chosen Woman of the Year by the Business and Professional Women of South County, RI and in 1985 she was awarded the Scholarly Achievement Award for Excellence in Research at URI. She has received a Fulbright Fellowship, the Tswett Medal in Chromatography, a citation from Brown University for outstanding research in the field of Chemistry, the Dal Nogare Award in Chromatography , an NSF Travel Award to work with The University of Tasmania and The Governor's Award for Contributions to Science and. Technology in the State of Rhode Island.