Dionex Honours IC Pioneer

Dionex Corporation has announced a permanent academic endowment at The University of Texas at Arlington that will benefit the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in College of Science. The endowment will set up The Hamish Small Chair of Ion Analysis to honour Hamish Small, the inventor of suppressed ion chromatography.

Employed as a purification technique starting late in the 19th century, the use of ion exchange as an analytical technique for inorganic chemicals was limited by the difficulty of detecting ions in a highly conductive background. Hamish Small developed an ionic suppressor that enabled direct detection of charged species with a conductivity detector. This eventually led to the establishment of Dionex Corporation, recognised as a market leader in IC instrumentation.

“Hamish Small is one of the giants of modern analytical chemistry,” said Christopher Pohl, Senior Vice President of R&D and Chief Science Officer at Dionex Corporation. “His contributions to analytical chemistry are numerous, including: Indirect Photometric Detection, Hydrodynamic Chromatography, and Ion Chromatography. We at Dionex, wanted to honour his many contributions to analytical chemistry by permanently endowing a chair, named in his honour, and feel that the University of Texas at Arlington is a perfect setting for such an honour.”

It is the intent of Dionex Corporation to give a total of USD 500,000 to the endowment by 2014.