Meet The Speaker
About
Terry Berger
Dr. Berger is widely considered to be the father of modern supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC). He was first exposed to what would now be called SFC in 1971 when he was a graduate student at Purdue. "Buck" (L.B.) Rogers had a lab next to his, but the home-made equipment engendered something less than buy-in (30 inch columns packed with smashed brick dust? really?). He joined Hewlett Packard in 1979 just as Dennis Gere and HP labs presented 3 seminal papers at Pittcon that marked the beginning of modern packed column SFC, largely as we know it today. Berger was tasked to determine the future direction of SFC in 1985. In 1988, he convinced HP management to develop the first purpose built SFC, which was introduced in 1992. He bought and modified this business in 1995, creating Berger Instruments(BI). BI developed the first commercial chiral method development system, the first SFC-MS, the first commercially successful semi-prep SFC's for both library purification and chiral multi-gram separations with 2 to 5cm ID columns, plus various gas delivery systems, and other advances. The business was sold, first to Mettler-Toledo, then Thar, then Waters, who was obliged to discontinue many of the products since they incorporated many (now) Agilent (former HP) components.
Since BI, Dr. Berger has formed several other companies related to SFC. Aurora SFC started in 2008. Aurora developed a module that can theoretically convert almost any HPLC into a state-of-the-art SFC. In 2012, Agilent Technologies acquired Aurora to create their current SFC product line. Dr. Berger is still active in SFC research and consulting.