Dr. James Harynuk

After completing my undergraduate degree in Environmental Chemistry at the University of Waterloo in 1999, I joined the newly-formed research group of Tadeusz Górecki also at the University of Waterloo. There we were the first Canadian researchers to begin studying this new and exciting field of comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GC×GC). Over the course of my graduate work, I developed several modulators for GC×GC and invented a new mode of operation for GC×GC, termed stop-flow GC×GC, and conducted the first systematic studies into column overloading effects in GC×GC.

I finished my PhD in December of 2004, and in January 2005 I took up a position with the Australian Centre for Research on Separation Science at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Australia working with Philip Marriott. While there I continued studies into GC×GC applications and theory. We introduced the use of short primary columns for fast GC×GC and simultaneously became the first group to use cold-on-column injection for a GC×GC separation. We also introduced the concept of the Modulation Ratio – a term that relates the width of a peak eluting from the first dimension to the modulation period. This allows one to quickly and easily evaluate the extent of modulation in a separation and compare the modulation between separations.

In May 2007, I found myself here at the University of Alberta, starting up a new laboratory. In the past 15 years the group has grown significantly and our research has broadened to include forensics, metabolomics and chemometrics.