The Torbern Bergman Medal 2003

High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) is today the dominating separation technique in most application areas. Csaba Horváth (Roberto C. Goizueta Professor of Chemical Engineering, Yale University, New Haven, USA) is widely known as a pioneer of modern separation science,playing a key role in the development of HPLC in the late 1960’s to early 1980’s. During recent decades he has further made essential contributions to the development of electrodriven separation techniques, especially capillary electrochromatography (CEC). In recognition of his fundamental and innovative scientific work essential for the development of separation science to a mature tool, especially in the life sciences, Csaba Horváth is awarded the Torbern Bergman Medal 2003 by the Analytical Division of the Swedish Chemical Society.

Csaba Horváth, born in 1930, graduated in chemical engineering 1952 from the Technical University of Budapest, where he had a position until 1956, when he escaped the lost Hungarian revolution for West Germany. He got a job at Farbwerke Hoechst AG involving chemical process technology. In 1961 he returned to academia and started doctoral studies in gas chromatography under supervision of István Halász, a famous separation scientist, at the J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. Horváth developed novel types of columns and one of them, the support-coated open-tubular column (SCOT), was later commercialized. After receiving his Ph.D. he immigrated to USA, and since 1964 he has been employed by Yale University in New Haven, starting as an associate professor in the School of Medicine. In this laboratory he started to develop what later became known as HPLC. In fact it was Csaba Horváth who first baptized the technique to “High Performance Liquid Chromatography” in a lecture at the Pittsburgh Conference in 1970. He has frequently demonstrated a particular interest in the philology of words connected to separations, and many today well known terms originate from him, for example pellicular packings, isocratic elution and multimodal separations. During the first part of the 1970’s he temporarily left the scene of separation science to devote his research endeavors to enzyme engineering.

Returning back to separation science in the mid 1970’s he directed his research towards fundamental studies on reversed-phase liquid chromatography (RPLC). He developed the thermodynamically based solvophobic theory as a universal model for the retention mechanism in RPLC, which had a strong impact on the separation science society. During recent decades he has mainly concentrated his research in HPLC on the separation of peptides and proteins comprising both high-speed analytical separations, and preparative separations. Of special interest is the refinement of displacement chromato- graphy for preparative separations, a technique pioneered by the Swedish Nobel Laureate Arne Tiselius. The technique has recently also been applied to enhance sensitivity in analytical peptide separations coupled to MS. His recent research interests cover fundamental and applied studies on CEC, development of new adsorbents for biopolymer separations, theoretical and applied nonlinear chromatography, high speed HPLC, and interactions of biomacromolecules.

Csaba Horváth has published about 300 papers/book chapters and has several patents. The book Introduction to Separation Science, co-authored with Barry L. Karger and Lloyd R. Snyder, was an outstanding contribution for spreading knowledge on HPLC. He was the editor of the widespread series High Performance Liquid Chromatography – Advances and Perspectives, providing state-of-the-art coverage of HPLC theories and applications. He has received numerous awards and honors and only some are mentioned here: the M.S. Tsvett Award in Chromatography; the American Chemical Society National Award in Chromatography; the A.J.P. Martin Gold Medal; the Michael Widmer Award of the New Swiss Chemical Society. He is on the editorial board of numerous scientific journals, and a member of the permanent scientific committee of the well-established HPLC symposium series.