ACS Sensors, Analytical Chemistry, Journal of Proteome Research, and the ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry are excited to announce the winners of the inaugural Advances in Measurement Science Lectureship Award: Kourosh Kalantar-zadeh, Distinguished Professor and Director of the Centre for Advanced Electronics and Sensors, RMIT University Neil L. Kelleher, Walter and Mary E. Glass Professor […]
ACS Sensors, Analytical Chemistry, Journal of Proteome Research, and the ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry are excited to announce the winners of the inaugural Advances in Measurement Science Lectureship Award:
- Kourosh Kalantar-zadeh, Distinguished Professor and Director of the Centre for Advanced Electronics and Sensors, RMIT University
- Neil L. Kelleher, Walter and Mary E. Glass Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Professor of Chemistry and Medicine, Director of Northwestern Proteomics, Northwestern University
- Francesco Ricci, Associate Professor, Chemistry Department, University of Rome Tor Vergata
A New Award: Advances in Measurement Science Lectureship
This year the three ACS Publications measurement journals teamed up with the ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry to create a new award, the Advances in Measurement Science Lectureship Award, which would honor members of the community who have made a major recent impact in the field of measurement science, with winners selected on the basis of their lecture abstracts and their research output during the past five years.
“It’s important to remind people that almost everything we do in science involves measurement and those techniques and instruments come from the measurement sciences,” says John R. Yates, III, Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Proteome Research.
The group decided to give the Advances in Measurement Science Lectureship Award to three recipients each year – one each from the Americas, Europe/the Middle East/Africa (EMEA), and Asia-Pacific. “We wanted to cover both the breadth of the incredible analytical chemistry we are publishing, as well as represent the major regions of the globe,” says J. Justin Gooding, Editor-in-Chief of ACS Sensors.
Advances in Measurement Science Lectureship Symposium at Pittcon 2018
The inaugural Advances in Measurement Science Lectureship Award will be presented at a symposium by the same name, featuring lectures by the winners at Pittcon 2018, held February 26 though March 1 in Orlando, Florida.
The hardest part of establishing this new award was deciding where to have the symposium honoring the winner, says Jonathan V. Sweedler, Editor-in-Chief of Analytical Chemistry. “We selected Pittcon because it is a premier international analytical chemistry conference covering all the subfields of analytical chemistry.”
Kourosh Kalantar-zadeh
Kourosh Kalantar-zadeh is a Distinguished Professor and the Director of the Centre for Advanced Electronics and Sensors at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia. Here’s what he had to say about the field and his research:
What do you consider to be the most important advancement in measurement science in the past five years?
The smart ingestible chemical sensors that came from my lab are definitely one of the most important advancements. Others include:
- Fusion of sensor data from many sources to make the sensing assessments more accurate
- The expansion of the internet of things
- Inclusion of sensors that allowed more autonomous vehicles (such as driverless cars)
- The rapid adoption of wearable sensors
What advances has your lab made in the past five years?
I am proud of my group members for creating the following major outcomes in the past five years:
- Development and human trials of the first ingestible chemical sensor (human gas-sensing capsule)
- Demonstration of the fundamentals of sensors based on two-dimensional materials
- Re-introduction of physisorption concept for selective, sensitive, and low-cost sensing of pollutant gases of nitrogen oxides, which is now commercially used in many cities
- Development of a plasmonic sensing system, based on intercalatable metal oxides
What’s next in your research?
We have to finish the phase II human trial of our ingestible sensors to deliver these smart capsules to the market. Additionally, our idea of plasmonic two-dimensional ionic systems is now progressing rapidly and we have to publish more novel reports on them. My group is also working on the developing a new method of producing sensing materials using liquid metals as the reaction media.
What measurement science problems are you hoping to see get solved in the next decade?
I want to see ingestible sensors become very common and accessible to all by 2025. It has also been predicted that such smart capsules will generate a multi-billion-dollar industry by then.
Neil L. Kelleher
Neil L. Kelleher is the Walter and Mary E. Glass Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Professor of Chemistry and Medicine, and Director of Northwestern Proteomics at Northwestern University. Here’s what he had to say about the field and his own research:
What do you consider to be the most important advancement in measurement science in the past five years?
The most important development is the integrated advance in hybrid structural biology: Cryo-EM, combined with x-ray and diverse types of mass spectrometry (e.g., HDX, X-link, nMS). Particularly for native-mode proteomics, it captures some really complementary information about endogenous multi-protein complexes, complete with their covalent and non-covalent cofactors. Native proteomics allows a detailed accounting of the composition of endogenous protein complexes present within cells and tissues. Native Proteomics provides primary and quaternary structure, thus complementing x-ray and Cryo-EM as they determine the 3D structures at high resolution for proteins critical to health and disease.
What advances has your lab made in the past five years?
Some highlights that have come out of the Kelleher Research Group over the past five years include:
- Technological advances to enable robust, quantitative top-down proteomics for translational research
- Reduction to practice of a targeted histone analysis platform to understand epigenetic regulation (and misregulation) in cancer
- New applications for untargeted metabolomics to enable natural products discovery in bacteria and fungi
- Developing new instruments and methods for the study of intact multiproteoform complexes
What’s next in your research?
Over the next several years, I see a dual focus on increased molecular specificity. First, we are applying quantitative top-down proteomics onto purified cellular populations from tissue or blood, coupling the world of high-speed fluorescence-activated cell sorting with that of top-down proteomics. The second focus takes top-down mass spectrometry back to its targeted roots through the development and implementation of Proteoform Reaction Monitoring (PfRM) to tie specific proteoforms to phenotypes for diseases, expanding the footprint of proteomics in clinical and translational science.
What measurement science problem are you hoping to see get solved in the next decade?
Here’s my dream: I want to see a full atlas of protein content across the ~4000 cell types within the human body, what we’ve termed the cell-based human proteome project (CB-HPP). This is the protein-world’s answer to the human genome project of the 1990s. As the genome project increased in economic feasible through advances in sequencing technology, so too will the CB-HPP, the eventual goal being the identification of one billion proteoforms at $1/proteoform.
Francesco Ricci
Francesco Ricci is an Associate Professor of the Laboratory of Biosensors and Nanomachines in the Chemistry Department at the University of Rome, Tor Vergata. Here’s what he had to say about the field and his own research:
What do you consider to be the most important advancement in measurement science in the past five years?
The possibility to use synthetic nucleic acids – not just as recognition elements, but also as versatile scaffolds to build novel bio-engineering tools – has led to incredible advances in the development of new classes of analytical platforms. The past five years have seen a rise in the design of new engineered nucleic acids that can respond to different targets in a very specific, sensitive, and selective way and represent ideal candidates for the next generation of in vitro point-of-care diagnostics and in vivo imaging tools.
What advances has your lab made in the past five years?
In our laboratory, we have recently reported a whole series of novel rationally engineered nanodevices made of synthetic DNA that can respond to a broad range of molecular targets including small molecules, antibodies, and proteins. Such DNA nanodevices are rationally designed to undergo, in response to the binding of their specific target, a conformational change that can lead to a measurable optical or electrochemical output signal. Our analytical platforms are rapid, inexpensive, and work very well in complex samples, making them ideally suited for point-of-care detection.
What’s next in your research?
We plan to bring our analytical platforms into the real world! At the moment we are collaborating with a startup company to test a DNA nanoswitch that allows for rapid and low-cost measurement of diagnostic antibodies. We are also working on new concepts and strategies to demonstrate other possible uses of our DNA-based nanomachines such as drug-delivery and in vivo imaging.
What measurement science problem are you hoping to see get solved in the next decade?
I hope to see more and more new analytical tools that could allow the inexpensive, rapid, and sensitive measurement of diagnostic markers in clinical samples. In 10 years I would like to see that people can get diagnosed with a certain disease at their home by simply using a disposable kit and their own smartphone.
