A survey of the current state and probable direction of development of research activity internationally within chemometrics

Networks of developers, users and suppliers of chemometric software are widespread in the United States and Europe but there is little coordination within Australia, or indeed the Austral-asian region. Examples of national and international consortia in this field include the following.

CPAC: The Centre for Process Analytical Chemistry (CPAC) was established in 1984 at the University of Washington as a National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Centre. CPAC is now a self-sustaining organization, with a successful consortium of sponsors recruited from all sectors of industry, as well as several national laboratories and government agencies. The work and directions of CPAC's research programs include the investigation of issues related to the integration of process measurement with process modelling and control. This work is related to the investigation of new measurement approaches based on the miniaturization of traditional instrumentation and the development of new sensors and non-traditional instruments based on fundamentally different sensing mechanisms. CPAC is supporting research projects across a number of academic disciplines including chemistry, physics, engineering, genetics and food science. As well as government support, CPAC is sponsored by a wide and diverse range of manufacturing industries.

CPACT: The Centre for Process Analytics and Control Technology (CPACT) is a multidisciplinary centre in the UK. Formed in 1997 CPACT brings together chemical and process engineers, analytical chemists, control systems engineers, chemometricians, signal processing engineers, and statisticians, from academia and industry, to research solutions to generic problems in process monitoring and control. CPACT addresses the manufacturing challenges being faced by the chemical, biochemical, pharmaceutical, food and materials processing industries through the unique synergy of end-user process manufacturers, analytical vendor companies and control systems solution providers.

VICIM: The Virtual Institute for Chemometrics and Industrial Metrology (VICIM) was founded in the Department of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis at the Free University of Brussels. The institute comprises 13 centres from all over and in addition to industrial and commercial funding it is sponsored by the European Union. These centres, and the many others that exist, are indicative of the degree of collaboration between industry and academia that can be achieved by appropriate seed funding from government to initiate and enable formation of such networks.

[ Up ] [ Next ]