Practical particle presentations find favour with Particle Summit audience

by Paul Kippax, Friday, 12th November 2010

Just mulling over the feedback from October’s Malvern sponsored Particle Summit in Boston, I was interested to note just how much people  valued hearing about practical examples of particle characterization in action. It shouldn’t of course come as any surprise that we all want to learn from the practise of others and it’s great that so many in the field are willing to share their knowledge. The whole point of the summit was, after all, to engage with one another.

And when people were asked what they most enjoyed, the ‘wide range of speakers and topics’ was a recurring theme – closely followed, I have to say, by the ‘great visit to the Science Museum’. So in my books the work-life balance was about right! Truly the Museum of Science in Boston is very impressive and it was a joy to be part of the Gala Dinner there, rounding off the evening with a hair-raising performance in the Theater of Electricity.

But back to the science

While I don’t think it would be fair to refer to any of the presentations on the conference programme as hair-raising (at least not for the audience) they were certainly electrifying, bringing to life a diverse range of topics. An impressive list of guest speakers gave us many different perspectives on particle characterization over the two-day conference :

  • James H. Adair, Ph.D. from the Materials Science and Engineering department of  Pennsylvania State University talked us through ‘Monitoring Particle Dispersion in Complex Fluids Using Dynamic Light Scattering and Fluorescence Microscopy’
  • Dr. Joerg Bolze from our sister company PANalytical explained ‘Nanoparticle size distribution determination by small-angle X-Ray scattering on a multi-purpose X-ray diffractometer platform
  • Danny Chou, Ph.D., Bioprocess Analytical Scientist at Genzyme Corporation took us through ‘Subvisible Particles Detection and Quantitation as a Result of Protein Aggregation: Methods of Characterization
  • Mr William (Bill) Kopesky, Vice President of Analytical Services at Particle Technology Labs (PTL) regaled us with ‘Tales from the Service Lab Trenches……Challenging Samples for Laser Diffraction and How to Overcome Them’
  • Martin Muschol, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Physics at the  University of South Florida, Tampa FL, presented exciting new work that involves ‘Using Light Scattering To Study Self-Assembly of Amyloid Fibrils’
  • Kevin W. Powers, Ph.D., Associate Director of the Particle Engineering Research Center, University of Florida gave us a user perspective of ‘Laser Diffraction and Dynamic Light Scattering
  • Larry Weiss, M.D., Chief Technology Officer for CleanWell Company spoke about ‘Size and Zeta Measurements of Environmentally Friendly Cleaning Agents’

The talents of my colleagues from Malvern were equally impressive! Abstracts of all their presentations can also be found online at http://particlesummit.org/2010/program/speakers/.