About Us

Larry Miller is a Director in the Discovery Attribute Sciences group at Amgen in Thousand Oaks, CA. He has spent his career performing small molecule achiral and chiral purifications at the ug to multi-kg scale. At Amgen, where he has worked for almost twenty years, Larry manages a center of excellence that is responsible for all small-molecule purification support for the company’s Discovery and Development departments. Previously he spent 20 years at Searle/Pharmacia.

Larry has over 40 peer-reviewed publications and over 45 presentations at scientific meetings and he has served as co-instructor for SFC short courses in the US, Europe, and Asia. He has been involved with the Green Chemistry Group since its inception in 2007 and currently serves as President of the group. He earned his master’s in chemistry from Roosevelt University and his bachelor’s in chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“My early purification experience used HPLC, but over the past twenty years I’ve moved my group heavily into SFC and now act as an ambassador for the expansion of SFC into new industries and areas of separation sciences.,” Larry said.

J. David Pinkston is Technical Services Manager for Preservatives at Archer Daniels Midland Company. He’s been involved in the analytical uses of supercritical fluids for many years. David has been a member of the Green Chemistry Group Board of Directors since it was founded in 2007. He has used SFC, SFE, and related techniques to study personal care products, surfactants, polymers, pharmaceuticals, and foods, among other things. He’s an advocate for the use of supercritical fluids not only because of their environmental and cost-saving advantages, but because they provide technical advantages not easily obtained using conventional mobile phases or extraction fluids. Most recently, his interests have focused on oil/fat/lipid chemistry and oxidation prevention.

David received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University working in separations and mass spectrometry under the direction of J. Throck Watson and John Allison.

He was Chair of the ACS’s Division of Analytical Chemistry in 2002 – 2003, was the Division’s Program Chair for the Fall 2002 and Spring 2003 National ACS Meetings, and has served on the Executive Committee of the Subdivision of Chromatography and Separations Chemistry. David has authored or co-authored over 55 publications and presented over 130 lectures - the majority of which are in the areas of SFC and SFC/MS. He has taught various versions of the SFC short course since the early 1990s. David loves downhill skiing, enjoys the challenges of winemaking, and is an avid cyclist.

“I’m an advocate of the use of supercritical fluids not only because of their environmental and cost-saving advantages, but because they provide technical advantages not easily obtained using conventional methods,” David said.

Frank Riley, an Associate Research Fellow at Pfizer, began his pharmaceutical career in 1993 with Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis in the Analytical Method Development group where he supported early-to-late-stage development activities. From that time, Frank traversed the drug development space taking on various roles as a manufacturing team-lead to building and then leading a separation and purification sciences group supporting a Drug Discovery organization. In 2007, Frank moved to Groton and joined the Structure Elucidation Group where he currently leads the isolation/purification component of SEG along with his team providing technology development and separation sciences support. In addition to these functions, Frank and his team partner with industrial and academic collaborators to advance Supercritical Fluid Chromatography applications and technology advancement.

Francis Mannerino, is the Director of Sales for the Americas at SiliCycle, Inc. He started his career 25+ years ago as an HPLC column packer for Regis Technologies. He subsequently held multiple positions there, including Director of Chromatography and Director of Preparative Separations. While at Regis, Francis and his team designed and built the world’s first contract lab that performed preparative SFC separation services under GMP. For the past 10+ years, he has been with Quebec-based SiliCycle, Inc. as a sales professional and as their Preparative Separations Specialist.

“While I’m not active in the lab anymore, I’m still dedicated to the growth and regulatory advancement of supercritical fluid chromatography in the pharmaceutical, food and industrial chemical industries,” said Fran.

Eric Seest, is a Senior Advisor in Eli Lilly’s Discovery Chemistry Research & Technology (DCRT) operation based in Indianapolis, Indiana. He started at Lilly in 2003 in its large-scale purification operation, later leading the group in the application of Steady State Recycle HPLC and SFC to kg scale chiral separations. Prior to that, in 1987, Eric worked in the Natural Products Isolation and Characterization Discovery research group at Upjohn Co, where he was immersed in chromatography and separation science, including such highlights as developing lab-based analytical and preparative chiral HPLC. He did graduate work in Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine, and earned a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Bradley University and worked part time as a research associate at the USDA-NRRC. “I cut my teeth into SFC in 1997; using equipment that helped revolutionize the packed column SFC approach to pharmaceutical molecule chromatographic separations,” he said. “As a member of the Green Chemistry Board I enjoy being part of the effort to spread the good word of SFC to the masses.”

Nick Mitchell is Vice President of Business Development at ChromaDex. Nick is responsible for managing a variety of projects that contribute to the top line of the organization. Specifically, Nick is developing customer relationships within the business-to-business side of the company. From international distributor partners to new customers aligned within the healthcare and pharmaceutical markets; Nick is fostering collaborative relationships between external stakeholders and the Research and Development, Scientific Affairs Teams, Regulatory Affairs and Chromadex External Research Program (CERP) teams. The collaborations focus on current research and commercialization (or IP licensing) that all center around the company’s anchor product, Tru Niagen® (nicotinamide riboside).

Nick is a Board Member of the Green Chemistry Group since its inception in 2007. He has served in leadership roles, including Secretary, Treasurer and President. Nick has a passion for the commercialization of supercritical fluid technologies (chromatography and extraction) and works closely with professionals within the pharmaceutical industry and natural products space to optimize their processes and analyses as they trend to more sustainable solutions.

Prior to working at Chromadex, Nick spent almost twenty years in the life science industry, with the Danaher-owned company, Phenomenex. During his time at Phenomenex, Nick worked closely with pharmaceutical clients, helped develop a large-scale chromatography division, and spent more than a decade working and living in India and China and expanding the company’s footprint in Asia. Nick has a Bachelor of Science Degree in Chemistry from Gannon University (Erie, PA) and an Executive MBA from Pepperdine University (Malibu, CA). Nick lives with his family in the Maryland suburbs of Washington DC.

Caroline West is a full professor in analytical chemistry at the University of Orleans, France.

Her main scientific interests lie in fundamentals of chromatographic selectivity, both in the achiral and chiral modes mainly in supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC), but also in liquid chromatography (LC). She is also applying these methods to a variety of samples of pharmaceutical interest and natural products.

Caroline has authored more than 100 papers in international peer-reviewed journals, and has presented about 100 lectures in national and international conferences and seminars. In 2015, she received the “LC-GC Emerging Leader in Chromatography” award from LC-GC North America and was recognized several times as one of the most influential people in analytical sciences by “The Analytical Scientist” journal (2014, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021). In 2021, she was awarded the Jubilee medal from the British Chromatographic Society.
Apart from university teaching duties, Caroline has also contributed to many short courses and tutorials in SFC in international conferences (HPLC, HTC, ISC…) for young researchers and industry professionals.
She is also an advisory board member for several journals in separation science (e.g. Journal of Chromatography A, Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis, Chromatographia).