EigenU 2008 Best Posters

This year the Eigenvector University poster session was held in conjunction with the Center for Process Analytical Chemistry’s spring meeting dinner event. The EigenU crowd hopped a bus at the WAC and was whisked out to the University of Washington, where they hooked up with CPAC at the UW Club. Almost 20 posters were presented, about two-thirds of which came from UW/CPAC students, with the balance from EigenU attendees. Posters were judged by the Eigenvectorians in attendance (Neal, Jeremy, Rasmus, Willem, Scott, Chuck, Bob, and myself).

Lead authors for the winning posters were Paroma Chakravarty of the University of Minnesota and Rebecca Milczarek of the University of California at Davis. Each received Apple iPod nanos for their winning efforts.

Paroma’s contribution, “Determination of phase transformation in pharmaceutical solid dosage form (tablet) by multivariate analysis,” described how Principal Components Analysis was used to analyze Raman spectroscopic data to monitor phase transformation between hydrates of thiamine hydrochloride. Her co-authors included Marc Champagne and Leslie King of Eli Lilly and Raj Suryanarayanan of University of Minnesota. Ms. Chakravarty used the PCA routines from PLS_Toolbox, and provided a very succinct interpretation of the results.

Rebecca’s poster, “Assessment of tomato pericarp mechanical damage using multivariate analysis of magnetic resonance images,” demonstrated how MRIs can be used to detect bruising. Bruised tomatoes disintegrate during peeling, leading to loss of product. Co-authors included Mikal E. Saltveit of UC Davis and T. Casey Garvey of ConAgra Foods. The poster was presented by co-author Professor Michael J. McCarthy of UC Davis. Ms. Milczarek used PLS with the image tools from MIA_Toolbox to analyze the data.

Many thanks to all who presented their work or attended the poster session!

BMW