RECETO PhD course: Chemometrics for Environmental Science - 12.07.2010

RECETO Ph.D. course: Chemometrics for Environmental Science II

Handling excitation-emission fluorescence spectroscopy- and chromatographic mass spectrometry data

 

Tuesday 21st - Friday 24th of September 2010 at LIFE-UC

(2 ETCS)

 

Download flyer with info about the course.

 

Who should attend:
PhD students and post docs in environmental and/or analytical chemistry, who want to familiarize with data, their challenges and pre-processing, are the target for this short course. PhDs and researcher; employees of RECETO institutions will be prioritized. No more than 20 participants can be enrolled.

 

Practicalities:
The registration fee is 1000 DKR which will cover lunches as well as travel and accommodation for external speakers. Relevant literature will be provided two weeks before the start of the course. Registration goes to on Friday the 3rd of September at the latest.

 
Speakers:

The workshop will be hosted by post doc Nikoline J. Nielsen (NJN), and associate professor Jan H. Christensen (JCH), Department of Basic Sciences and Environment, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Copenhagen; assistant professor Thomas H. Skov (THS), Quality and Technology (Q&T), Department for Food Science, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Copenhagen; senior scientist Colin Stedmon (CST), National Environmental Research Institute, Department of Marine Ecology, Aarhus University; and associate professor Rolf Danielsson (RD), Department of Physical and Analytical Chemistry, Uppsala University. All correspondence should go to .

Minimum requirements:
All participants are expected to develop a project proposal aimed at chemometric evaluation of analytical chemical data in order to investigate a problem of relevance to their project. Before the course begins the participants should hand in a preliminary research proposal describing how to use analytical chemistry data combined with chemometric processing. It should include aim as well as a brief description of the experimental design, the data, the suspected challenges in using these data, the pre-processing to overcome these challenges and suggested data analysis. It should be in English, of no more than 2 pages, and send to no later than Monday the 6th of September. On day one each participant will do a short presentation of their aim and data (2-3 slides).  The project proposal in its preliminary form should be revised during the course, e.g. there will be 2 hours for revision at the end of day two where you should consider the take-home messages from the first two days of lectures and exercises and discuss your case with the other participants. Furthermore, on day four all participants will do a presentation of their research proposal and get feed-back from the audience (20 min each incl. discussions). This feed-back and the take-home messages of day three lectures and exercise should be incorporated in the final research proposal (maximum 2500 words) to be handed in at no later than Monday the 11th of October. The final research proposal will be revised by NJN and JCH. An approved research proposal will contain a concise description of data and how to acquire them, the challenges in handling these data, and suggestion on how to overcome these challenges. A written, but brief evaluation will be returned. The course can be considered passed if the participants have done a presentation on day four, and got their research proposal approved.
 

Motivation:
In spite of the excellent results obtained in the last 30 years for the analysis of chemical data, chemometrics is still not regarded as a standard tool for the investigation of data obtained from environmental surveys. Techniques such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Partial Least Squares Regression (PLSR) are often perceived as black-box procedures that involve much mathematics and many equations. This perception worsens even more for multi-way data analysis, which often requires a level of abstraction that discourages the non-initiated. Furthermore, analytical chemical data are often complex and requires heavy pre-processing prior to multivariate analysis and interpretation. The aim of the short course is to exemplify ways in which to handle analytical chemistry data in a chemometric context: From experimental design and data acquisition, to data pre-processing and multivariate data analysis. This second RECETO-workshop in the series ‘Chemometrics for Environmental Science’ focuses on how to handle excitation-emission (EEM) fluorescence spectroscopy- and chromatographic - mass spectrometry data.