Hello, Redditors! My name is Lee Polite. I am the president and founder of Axion Analytical Labs, Inc. and Axion Training Institute. My background is chromatography. I received my Ph.D. in chromatography (chemistry) from Virginia Tech, under the direction of Professor Harold McNair (world’s greatest guy and one of the fathers of modern HPLC and GC!). While in graduate school, I spent my time studying HPLC, GC, IC, SFC and CE. After a quick postdoc at Virginia Tech finishing up a cool project developing bomb detectors, I took a job as a research scientist with Amoco Corporation (now known as British Petroleum or BP).
I spent 9 years with Amoco, applying and honing my chromatography skills on projects for the various Amoco subsidiaries, including installing GC methods at refineries, developing HPLC methods for whacky organic chemists, consulting for the laser and biotechnology companies, running the environmental analysis group, and serving as the supervisor for a large refinery lab. After 9 fun years with Amoco, I left and started Axion Labs. Axion is a real hands-on chromatography laboratory, but our major purpose is to develop and teach hands-on HPLC and GC courses to professionals. Over the years I’ve taught some 8000 scientists from every major pharmaceutical, chemical and petroleum company in the US, along with most of the major US government labs (DEA, FDA, EPA, DOD, DOE, etc.). I’ve also had the pleasure of teaching chromatography in 17 different countries. I have also written three book chapters and over one hundred course manuals on HPLC and GC. Axion is the sole provider of hands-on HPLC and GC training courses for the American Chemical Society.
My research interests include fast HPLC and fast GC. To me, that means taking existing methods, and making them much faster (2-20X) while still providing good resolution between peaks. For example, in our hands-on training courses, we end the week with a method development project. The participants (many of them were beginners when the course started) are given an unknown in a vial, and are expected to come up with a working HPLC or GC method. The next step is to see how fast they can do the separation. These are samples that the industry would consider to be 15-20 minute runs. Every one of the participants will come up with an excellent method from scratch, that accomplishes the separation in less than a minute! The trick to all of this is understanding the fundamentals of chromatography.
We specialize in teaching these chromatography fundamentals in a unique and understandable way, using analogies (transferable concepts). For example, everyone finds it easy to drive a car. We know what pedal to push to make it go faster, which pedal slows us down, and which device changes the direction of travel. Using that knowledge, we can teach someone how to “drive” an HPLC or GC. We teach what “button” to press to make the analysis go faster, what “knob” to turn to get better resolution, and what parameters to look at when the separation is not good. The great thing is that the participants don’t simply memorize things, but truly understand how chromatography works. So please, ask me anything to do with chromatography (HPLC, GC, IC, etc.), and I hope to come up with a good explanation…and have a little fun along the way! I’ll be back at 2:00 PM EDT to answer your questions!
submitted by /u/AmerChemSocietyAMA to /r/science
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