Winner: Ian Wilson
Professor Wilson was born in 1953 and started his career as a biochemist investigating the developmental hormones in desert locusts, whilst studying for his PhD at Keele University. He left academia after completion of a 1-year post doc to start his illustrious career in industry. His first role was at the Hoechst Pharmaceuticals working in the drug metabolism department. He left Hoechst in 1986 to join Imperial Chemicals Industries, based at the Alderley Park site just on the outskirt of Manchester, UK. Although the name of the company changed, Ian remained at Alderley Park going through the break-up of the ICI empire, with the birth of Zeneca Pharmaceuticals and then going through the merger with the Swedish Astra organisation.
Ian spent most of his working career within the Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics department at the AstraZeneca Research site at Alderley Park in Cheshire (UK), most recently as a Senior Principal Scientist. Since September 2012 he has been at Imperial College in London. He is the author, or coauthor, of some 500 papers or reviews, and has received a number of awards in separation and analytical science from the Royal Society of Chemistry, including the Gold Medal of the Analytical Division (2005) and most recently the Knox Medal of the RSC Separation Science Group (2012). He received the Jubilee Medal of the Chromatographic Society in 1994 and gave the inaugural Desty Memorial lecture for Innovation in Separation Science in 1996. In 2014 he received the International Award of the Belgian Society for Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Bioanalysis Significant Contribution Award (BOSCA) from the journal “Bioanalysis”.
His research is directed towards the development of hyphenated techniques in chromatography and their application to problems in drug metabolism, toxicology and metabonomics. As well as his very strong academic record Ian has also been heavily involved with the organisational aspects of the Chromatographic Society. One of Ian’s great abilities is to connect like minded people and one area where he demonstrated this strength was in organising conferences and meetings. He was instrumental in ensuring the success of the Reid Forum; it recently celebrated its 21st birthday. He has also been actively involved with the ISC organisation, as well as the International Symposium on Chiral Separations.
It is very evident that Professor Wilson has demonstrated that even working in industry it is still possible to do world leading research, and for these reasons the Chromatographic Society are very proud to confer him the Martin Medal for 2016.
