The Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water (PSIPW) collaborated with the 21st Annual Workshop on Emerging High-Resolution Mass Spectrometry & LC-MS/MS Applications in Environmental Analysis and Food Safety, which was held in Ottowa, Canada from 7-8 October 2024.
This international workshop encourages an exchange of the latest information and ideas among scientists from academia, governmental agencies and industry to evaluate practical aspects of the usefulness of high resolution mass spectrometry and tandem mass spectrometric techniques for screening and quantitation of organic contaminants in the environmental and food samples. This year’s focus was on contaminants in water and other matrices.
The workshop dates back to 2005 and rotates annually between Spain, Canada, and the United States. PSIPW has contributed to the workshop since its 16th iteration in 2020 by sponsoring its keynote speakers and select student participants through its Prince Sultan Water Specialist Grant Programme.
This year’s keynote speaker recipient was Rob J. Letcher, Senior Research Scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) and Adjunct Research Professor at Carleton University. He participated with “Analysis of individual chain length congeners of polychlorinated alkanes in lipid rich samples by liquid versus gas chromatography with high resolution mass spectrometry”.
Three young researcher recipients were sponsored to participate in the workshop and share their research. They were:
[1] Georgina Kalogerakis, Laval University, Canada
“Targeted and non-targeted analyses of reaction products formed during remediation of toluene by heat-activated peroxydisulfate in groundwater”
[2] Louis Thomas, McGill University, Canada
“Impact of daily usage and washing on the contaminant and microplastics loads released from reusable drinking water bottles and food storage bags”
[3] Emmanuel Tolefe, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada
“Identification of new markers of AFFF contamination in surface water and groundwater near a hotspot in Atlantic Canada”
PSIPW’s 2012 Water Management & Protection Prize laureate, Damià Barceló of the University of Almeria, Spain, represented PSIPW at the workshop and encouraged nomnations to its prizes.
He also officiated the reception of the grant recipients along with Andrzej Wnorowski, the chair of the workshop, both seen here with the PSIPW prestigious researcher grant recipient Rob J. Letcher.
