History & Philosophy
May 30 – June 2, 2027 · Montepríncipe Campus, Madrid
History
The first HPCE symposium
Originally established as the International Symposium on High Performance Capillary Electrophoresis (HPCE), the first event was held in 1989 in Boston, MA. The meeting was founded by Professor Barry Karger from Northeastern University, and sponsored by the Barnett Institute of Northeastern University, the Bay Area Chromatography Committee (BACC, predecessor of California Separation Science Society or CASSS), and chromatography and electrophoresis instrument manufacturers.
This symposium was introduced at the moment when capillary electrophoresis branched off from the HPLC community, giving the technology the necessary focus at a time when capillary electrophoresis instrumentation was first being commercialized by Applied Biosystems, Beckman (later Beckman-Coulter), Hewlett-Packard (later Agilent Technologies), and others.
A worldwide series
The symposium series was organized world-wide by Prof. Karger until 2000 and later by CASSS in the USA. In Europe and Asia, the meetings were organized by separate bodies.
From HPCE to MSB
The Scientific Advisory Board changed the name of these meetings at HPCE 2004 in Salzburg to MicroScale Bioseparations (MSB), since the attendees’ interests expanded into the related techniques of micro- and nano-HPLC, microfluidic separations, and Lab-on-a-Chip applications while the fascination with pure CE slowly faded.
An award and a new name
At MSB 2012 in Geneva, Switzerland, Beckman-Coulter established the prestigious Arnold O. Beckman Medal and Award (now, the SCIEX Award) for Outstanding Scientific Achievements in The Field of Electrodriven Separations Techniques which has become an essential element of the series.
At that time, the Scientific Advisory Board changed its name to «Strategic Program Committee» (SPC). The name also changed to «Microscale Separations and Bioanalysis».
The Society is founded
The Society for Microscale Separations and Bioanalysis (SMSB) was officially founded on December 13, 2017, as a not-for-profit organization to back up the conference chairs, work on a strategic level, further develop the conference series, explore alliances and cooperations, and, in general, promote microscale separations and bioanalysis.
Philosophy
The MSB symposia are intended to be a forum for the discussion of fundamental and application-driven aspects of microscale separations and bioanalysis within an international community composed of thought-leaders and emerging scientists from both the academic and industrial sides.
In order to guarantee the presentation of new, current, controversial and/or unpublished work and foster active discussions during the oral and poster sessions, the Society has developed some signature guidelines.
Discussion of unpublished work
An environment is provided that helps protect unpublished work through a series of confidentiality measures to be abided by conference attendees, an approach used successfully by the Gordon Conferences.
Fostering diversity while maintaining high quality
The number of invited speakers is reduced, building most of the oral program (70%) from submitted abstracts. The abstracts will be comprehensive overviews of the scientific work, including data and figures. They will be scored by double-blind peer review, blind of title, name or affiliation for the session. This whole process is done with transparency, to encourage maximum participation.
Encouraging vigorous scientific debate and discussion
Presentations are limited to 2/3 of the allotted time for the lecture (12 min), leaving 1/3 of the allotted time (7 min) for discussion. This approach is also applied during the poster pitch presentations.