Transforming Chromatography

Agilent Life Sciences and Chemical Analysis is a leading global provider of instrumentation, supplies, software and services to the life science and chemical analysis markets. With revenue of $2.7 billion, the group accounted for approximately 50% of Agilent's $5.4 billion of total revenue in 2010. Their 8,000 employees serve more than 25,000 customers in more than 100 countries.

Agilent provides the world’s most complete, most reliable laboratory productivity solutions, optimized for your applications and workflows. Through a combination of industry-leading instruments, accessible scientific expertise, easy-to-use software and a full range of global support services, we are committed to delivering better results, faster than ever.

Pace Analytical’s Instrument Support Group (ISG) sells refurbished lab equipment.  ISG recycles, buys, sells, customizes, refurbishes and services analytical laboratory equipment for companies in various industries worldwide.

Pace Analytical’s Instrument Support Group provides a variety of refurbished analytical instrumentation to various sectors of the analytical industry worldwide.  ISG specializes in chromatography equipment including SFC, GC, GC/MS, HPLC and LC/MS.

Terry A. Berger was born in 1946 in rural Minnesota, U.S.A.  He received a PhD in analytical chemistry from Imperial College, University of London, in 1975, after graduate work at Florida, Wisconsin and Perdue. One of his five projects was an electrochemical detector for hplc.

He taught in Brazil for a year, then worked for several years on projects related to the space program, including  an electrolyzer to convert the Martian atmosphere into fuel (CO or CH4) and oxidizer (O2), triply redundant sensors, fuel cells, hydrogen generators, and in-situ re-generation of reagents for use in total organic carbon (TOC) and total oxygen demand (TOD) analyzers. Most of his GC work was behind the scenes at HP/Agilent for 18 years where he was a strong proponent of very fast GC, qualitative analysis using many parallel phases, miniaturization, pressure programming, quantitative hydrogen generation, portable GC and GC-MS, and many non-standard detectors. He holds the “world record” for the highest efficiency GC separation (1.3 million effective plates). Some of his suggestions such as pressure programming were incorporated into commercial products. His pulsed amperometric HPLC detector was commercialized by HP/Agilent but with a different flow cell from his original wall-jet design. He was the first electrochemical consultant/theoretician on the HP CE projects in the early 1990’s.

Dr. Berger is considered by many to be the father of modern Supercritical Fluid Chromatography (SFC). Starting in 1985, he spent more than a decade systematically undoing many of the misconceptions about packed column SFC. In the process he deconvoluted density and solvent strength effects. He showed that, contrary to several proposed theories, very long columns with large pressure drops were feasible. He introduced the use of additives and systematically studied their effect on peak shape and retention. He demonstrated the separation of broad classes of compounds and, against the common perception, showed that packed column SFC was broadly applicable to small drug-like molecules. He specified the feature set of the Hewlett Packard SFC G1205A which was commercially released in 1992. More recently he led a team in the development of separator technology which allows quantitative recovery of solutes without cyclone separators or aerosol generation. This development won a R&D 100 award as one of the 100 most important technical developments of 2000.

When Terry Berger, Mark Shuman, and Rick White founded Berger Instruments, Inc. in 1995, they embarked upon this foray into entrepreneurship envisioning only success. Almost 10 years later, it seemed that success was just what they found. As testament to this, Terry was honored with the Martin Gold Medal Award given by the Chromatographic Society of the United Kingdom. This award is given “to a scientist who has made an outstanding contribution to the advancement of separation science.” 

Dr. Berger’s book, “Packed Column SFC” was published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1995. He has also published 8 book chapters, plus approximately 50 scientific papers in refereed journals, plus >20 application notes. He has presented or participated in more than 20 short courses on SFC for various organizations, has given more than 300 invited oral presentations, hundreds of posters, and has received or has in process, approximately 30 patents in GC, SFC, and HPLC. He has written 3 encyclopedia entries and an ASTM description of SFC.

He has been the Editor for Gas Chromatography for the journal Chromatographia since 1991. He has been a reviewer for all the major chromatography journals and for the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Berger is currently the Chief Technical Officer for Aurora SFC Systems, Inc.

T.Z. Chu
Chief Executive Officer

TZ Chu has served as CEO of Hoefer Scientific Instruments (biotech instruments and supplies) and Finnigan Instruments (mass spectrometers) and as General Manager of Varian Associates divisions, producing chromatography and atomic absorption spectrophotometer instruments. He has also served on the board of several private and public technology companies, trade associations and international scientific organizations, and as a special limited partner of H&Q venture group.

Terry A. Berger, PhD
Chief Technology Officer

Dr. Berger is considered by many to be the father of modern super-critical fluid chromatography (SFC). Starting in 1985, he systematically undid many of the misconceptions surrounding SFC. He showed the importance of adequate compressibility compensation to allow separate control of pressure, flow, and composition. He de convoluted the effects of solvent strength and density, showing SFC was far more like HPLC than GC. He introduced the use of polar additives making separation of the strongest organic acids and bases routine. He demonstrated very long small particle packed columns could be practical.

 Dr. Berger, along with a colleague from Hewlett Packard (now Agilent Technologies), founded Berger Instruments to provide instruments for the super-critical fluid chromatography market. Along the way they converted the technique from a curiosity to a generally accepted technique in pharmaceutical drug discovery. As Chief Technology Officer at Aurora SFC Systems, Dr Berger remains dedicated to advancing the science of SFC and to creating new, revolutionary ways to bring SFC into the mainstream in a cost effective manner.

 
Tami MacDuff
Chief Financial Officer

Tamara MacDuff brings more than 15 years of extensive high technology global financial management and operational experience to her position as Chief Financial Officer of Aurora, as well as over seven years of experience in the software as a service industry. Her background includes senior roles in leading companies in the high technology, software and software-as-a-service industries including Yodlee, Biz360, and Brio Software. Skilled in a broad range of disciplines including public company management, international finance, treasury, corporate finance functions, including investor relations and merger and acquisition activities, human resources, legal, and operations.

A Certified Public Accountant, Tamara has a B.S. degree in Business Administration, with a concentration in Accounting from San Jose State University.

Rick Wikfors
Vice President, Research and Development

Rick Wikfors has spent his career making instruments smarter and easier to use. During his 20 plus years developing instruments and systems for analytical chemistry, he has contributed to several awarded patents and gained expertise in the software systems that embed in, or control, the components of a chromatographic system. With primary responsibility for managing research and development, Rick uses his technical expertise to ensure that high value and quality are represented in Aurora SFC Systems' products.

Kimber Fogelman, PhD
Senior Research Scientist

Dr. Fogelman has been involved in the design and testing of analytical and preparative instrumentation since the early 1980’s. He has contributed to multiple awarded patents to date with several additional applications currently under review, including the development of the SFC Fusion concepts. Other contributions have dramatically simplified the practice of robotics, automation and SFC from sample preparation and introduction to collection. As a trained chemist, Dr Fogelman is well aware of the complexities and challenges facing laboratory and industrial chemists. However, as an inventor, he prizes simplicity over all else. By creating simple, easy to use innovations, he hopes to equip chemists to make their tasks safer, more informative, more productive and more enjoyable.

Dave Wetherell
Vice President, Marketing

Dave is the former SFC Product Marketing Manager with the Waters Corporation. He joined Terry Berger and Mark Shuman just after the start of Berger Instruments in 1997. In various roles throughout numerous acquisitions, he has made major contributions from both the service and marketing perspective, leading the service organization through major transitions at Berger, Mettler Toledo, Thar, and Waters. Dave has spent the last 14 years supporting SFC Technology, with the belief that it is a superior technology to HPLC for normal phase separations, particularly chiral analysis. He started his career at Spectra-Physics in Sunnyvale, CA, and spent 9 years at Hewlett-Packard in various roles, completing his work there in the launch of the HP8453 spectrophotometer, reporting to the Waldbronn Analytical Division.