Highlights of HPLC 2009

The 34th International Symposium on High Performance Liquid Phase Separations and Related Techniques, which alternates between Europe, Japan, and North America, was held, for the first time, in Dresden, Germany from June 28 to July 2, 2009. More affectionately known as HPLC 2009, the symposium is the premier scientific event for bringing together the myriad of techniques related to separations in liquid and supercritical fluid media. Chaired by Prof. Christian Huber of the University of Salzburg, Austria, HPLC 2009 assembled 1240 scientists from a total of 51 countries. This number included 270 vendor representatives from over 64 exhibitors for the three-day instrument, software, and consumables exhibition. Students constituted nearly a quarter of the conferees, which speaks highly for the next generation of separation scientists. Based upon the number of attendees and exhibitors, the worldwide economic crisis did not play heavily into the support for this important conference.

The five-day plus event had a total of 128 oral presentations in plenary and parallel sessions and over 600 posters in sessions with 20 themes. With an ample social event schedule, 15 vendor workshops (some with free lunch), 12 tutorial educational sessions, and eight short courses, the latter held during the previous weekend, attendees had their hands full deciding how to allocate their time. The tutorials were particularly well attended and covered current topics such as bioanalytical liquid chromatography (LC)–mass spectrometry (MS)-MS, miniaturization, validation, biomarkers, stationary phases, quality by design, speciation, multidimensional LC, microchips, and hyphenated techniques.