Some children dream of becoming a doctor when they grow up. Some, a lawyer. Others, a police officer, a firefighter, or a teacher. No one dreams of becoming a mass spectrometrist. I certainly didn’t. My journey has been an unusual one in many respects. I disliked chemistry in middle school and high school (though I had a penchant for general math and science) and initially joined the undergraduate physics department at the University of Evansville in southern Indiana. After two semesters and a serendipitous (and ironic) enrollment in organic chemistry, I changed my major to chemistry and added an applied math major for fun. Along the way, I joined Prof. Arlen Kaufman’s analytical chemistry research group and, after gaining some experience with mercury quantitation by cold vapor atomic absorption spectroscopy, I was eventually introduced to chemical quantitation by LC-MS/MS, ambient ionization, and tandem mass spectrometry. Who knew that measurement science was considered chemistry? So what’s unusual about my journey is that I disliked (wet) chemistry. I also disliked most of physics. And I found that math wasn’t particularly thrilling unless I had something practical to do with it. But when I discovered that chemistry + physics + math = mass spectrometry, I was instantly hooked. My MS journey would next lead me to pursue a PhD in Graham Cooks’ lab at Purdue University. At Purdue I grew fond of portable mass spectrometers and developed new methods of mass analysis for quadrupole ion traps. During my PhD I was fortunate to collaborate with extraordinary scientists at NASA, Merck, and FLIR through the support of an ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry fellowship, a NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship, and generous funding from collaborators and government agencies. After graduating I elected to expand my horizons during my post-doc by joining the Resource for Native Mass Spectrometry Guided Structural Biology under Prof. Vicki Wysocki (a fellow Cooks PhD) at Ohio State University. I developed tools for determination of macromolecular structure by surface-induced dissociation, gas-phase hydrogen/deuterium exchange, and ion mobility spectrometry. After nearly 3 years of working with large molecules and even larger instruments, I decided to come full circle and join Teledyne FLIR as a Research Scientist in the portable MS division. Now I’m working with small instruments and even smaller molecules.

There and back again: How a small-town Hoosier discovered mass spectrometry

Fall 2022 abstracts, posters, and presentations will launch in mid-September.

ACS Fall 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.