Dr. Michael Hicks has over 20 years of pharmaceutical research experience. Dr. Hicks started in Analytical Research and Development in 1989 at Merck, received his PhD from Seton Hall University in 1997. He taught an Advanced Biomedical Engineering Graduate Laboratory at the Stevens Institute of Technology as adjunct faculty for ten years. He served as the 2017 Program Director for the Eastern Analytical Symposium and is an affiliate member of the EAS Board of Directors. He leads the Analytical Chemistry sub team of the Pharmaceutical Chemistry Roundtable for the ACS Green Chemistry Initiative Global Consortium. He is currently in the Analytical Chemistry and Enabling Technologies group in the Analytical R & D Department at Merck Research Labs in Rahway NJ specializing in separations, particularly in supercritical fluid chromatography as well as other large molecule method like size exclusion with multi-angle light scattering.
Dr. Paul Ferguson is a separation science specialist at AstraZeneca in the UK. He has worked in the pharmaceutical industry since 1999. Paul has interests in (U)HPLC, SFC, CE, chiral separations, formulated drug sample preparation, green analytical chemistry and chromatographic method development. He is a past winner of the Desty Memorial lecture prize (2002), a Fellow and Chartered Chemist in the Royal Society of Chemistry and lectures on his research interests at various UK universities. He has published over 20 peer-reviewed papers, 3 book chapters on aspects of green analytical chemistry and sits on the editorial advisory board for LCGC magazine. Paul is also Honorary Secretary of The Chromatographic Society in the UK. He has previously served as Vice-President for the Society from 2009 to 2014 and President from 2014 to 2017.