Speaker: Asher Newsome, Smithsonian Institution

Topic: Ambient Sampling and Ionization for Mass Spectrometry of Museum Objects
and Materials

Date: Monday, December 16th, 2019

Time: 6:15 pm Dinner, 7:15 pm Presentation

Location: Shimadzu Scientific Instruments, Inc. Training Center 7100 Riverwood Drive, Columbia, MD 21046 (Directions)

Dinner: Please RSVP to Meghan Burke (meghan.burke@nist.gov) by Friday, December 13th if you will be attending the dinner.

Abstract: The pace of development of ambient mass spectrometry has hardly slowed since kicking off fifteen years ago. Whether a given technique moves from academia to industry or follows some other path, often a design originally intended to be a general-purpose analytical MS tool – versatile, based on fundamental principles, relatively open-source – becomes increasingly engineered toward niche applications, particularly the biomedical and defense markets. With some 150 million objects (including living specimens) in its collection that have been selected for conservation and are available for study, the interests of the Smithsonian Institution fill every niche. The versatility, modularity, and throughput of our mass spectrometry systems are therefore a top priority. A varied selection of our recent projects using ambient ionization, direct analysis in real time (DART), and solid phase microextraction (SPME) to analyze ancient, historic, and modern objects is presented, as well as some of our instrumental modifications to accommodate the unique needs of a museum.