Post Travel Awardee Statements

The SGMS awards on a regular basis travel grants to students for national and international meetings. In this section, the awardees present a small report on their travel.

I visited the annual ASMS meeting 2019 in Atlanta, supported by an ASMS travel grant. The conference offered a variety of formats such as short courses, oral presentations, posters and workshops for a wide selection of different topics. This enabled me to expand my existing knowledge as well as explore new fields within mass spectrometry. During the poster sessions, in which I presented on the topic of “Insights on cation-adduct formation in MALDI mass spectrometry”, I had several interesting discussions and received a lot of valuable feedback. It was also a great opportunity to meet distinguished scientists on my field of research and ask questions. I would like to thank the Swiss group for mass spectrometry for the financial support, which allowed me to gain this unique experience.I visited the annual ASMS meeting 2019 in Atlanta, supported by an ASMS travel grant. The conference offered a variety of formats such as short courses, oral presentations, posters and workshops for a wide selection of different topics. This enabled me to expand my existing knowledge as well as explore new fields within mass spectrometry. During the poster sessions, in which I presented on the topic of “Insights on cation-adduct formation in MALDI mass spectrometry”, I had several interesting discussions and received a lot of valuable feedback. It was also a great opportunity to meet distinguished scientists on my field of research and ask questions. I would like to thank the Swiss group for mass spectrometry for the financial support, which allowed me to gain this unique experience.

The International Symposium on High-Performance Liquid Phase Separations (HPLC) is an international forum for the scientific discussion of methods of high-performance liquid chromatography and complementary separation techniques. This year the conference took place in Milan, Italy from 16 to 20 June 2019. Many international scientists attended the conference and diverse of oral and poster presentation was a great opportunity to expand our professional network and knowledge.

Thomas Stricker
In the recent years, traditional chromatographic data analysis methods have rapidly evolved to address the new challenges caused by the emergence of two-dimensional separations techniques and high throughput screening, as well as to adapt to the rapid acquisition of massive amounts of complex data in fields, such as pharmacology, toxicology and forensic. The “Data Analysis” session was, in my opinion, one of the highlights of the conference, as scientists addressed one of the greatest challenges of our generation: Big data. Solutions for dealing with massive data treatment were discussed, from the use of Bayesians statistics to machine learning and advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI). These approaches were cleverly presented, and explanations were perfectly adapted to an audience of mostly neophytes. I particularly appreciated that the methods’ advantages and weaknesses were equally discussed. We were constantly reminded that although computational approaches are extremely promising and, in many situation, undoubtedly necessary, human validation is and will always be required.

Maria Fernanda Cifuentes Girard
The SGMS Travel Award support my participation on the HPLC conference. Under the category application on a section dedicated to metabolomics and lipidomics I had a poster presentation titled “Quantification of polar metabolites in urine using automated parallel derivatization and LC-SWATH/MS”. During this time, I had pleasant discussing with people interested on my research and working on the same field. It was fruitful to exchange some ideas about metabolomics and high performance liquid chromatography- mass spectrometry. In addition, gave me the opportunity to attended interesting oral presentations about lipidomics, proteomics, metabolomics and their application to biomarker discovery, topic that I am interested in my future research on my PhD project.

We would like to thank the SGMS board for supporting our participation at the 2019 HPLC conference held in Milan, Italy.