Authors: Patrick J. Cutler
Source: Journal of Chemometrics (article, 2019-03-13)
Field: Chemistry — Physical and Theoretical Chemistry

Paul Gemperline's contributions to chemometrics and beyond Dr. Paul Gemperline's passion and drive for chemometrics has always been obvious and infective. A famous quote of Paul's among his former students is “some people like to solve crossword puzzles, I like to write code to solve chemistry problems.” Paul's passion and drive towards taking on difficult challenges, learning new concepts, building life-long friendships, and sharing his wealth of knowledge has led to a long and prosperous career in chemometrics and beyond. Paul is known to be relentless both in and out of the lab. He loves adventure and pushing himself to his limits. His adventurous spirit is exemplified by his many hobbies, which include cycling, sailing, building his own kayak, and photography. To fit preparation for a hiking trip in the Grand Canyon into his busy schedule, Paul spent his free time for a several months trekking up and down the most challenging and convenient site that he could find in the flat lands of eastern North Carolina (five flights of stairs in the chemistry building with his pack full of weights). Paul first introduced me to mountain biking as an undergraduate. I was about half Paul's age and a Division 1 college athlete, but he put me in the dust and had me gasping for my breath on the trail. Paul is still an avid cyclist. After a serious bicycle accident a couple of years ago, when his hip was broken in three places, he continually checked in at work to ensure all processes were operating smoothly. After healing, he was back on the bike and pedaling as strongly as ever, with plans to do a mountain century ride. Paul demonstrates this same tenacity towards chemometrics and any other endeavor that he undertakes. Paul has spent the entirety of his professional career at East Carolina University (ECU). Amazingly, Paul built his career and has produced world-renowned chemometrics research with the limited resources of mostly undergraduates and master's level students. The success of Dr Gemperline's students is at the heart of his career. He was and is truly passionate about the students and their accomplishments. He demonstrated this by investing a significant amount of time into each of us, ensuring that we would succeed. In addition to frequent one-on-one meetings, he assembled a comprehensive chemometrics notebook and held weekly classes, where he taught us the fundamentals of chemometrics and coding in MATLAB. This notebook turned into the core of several chapters for his book (Gemperline, Paul. Practical guide to chemometrics. CRC press, 2006). Paul loves to teach under any circumstance. For example, he would organize sailing trips with his research group. As we are sailing in the murky waters of the Pamlico River, Paul would teach us about vector forces on the sails and the physics behind the hull speed along with the mechanics and hands on experience of how to sail. Paul can describe unfamiliar and complex chemometrics theory in seconds making the concept and complicated mathematics clear as day. I hypothesize that Paul's uncanny ability to teach chemometrics stem from his strong fundamental understanding of chemometrics developed through his self-taught chemometrics background. I did not realize that Paul was a self-taught chemometrician until recently reading a short piece written by David Haaland (Haaland, David. “Honoring Paul Gemperline for his 11-year service as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Chemometrics.” Journal of Chemometrics: e3072). Putting his tendency to challenge himself into perspective, this makes complete sense. I am assuming that Paul used the same vigor to teach himself chemometrics with which I have seen him ride a bike with blazing speed through a narrow slit between two trees. This is part of the makeup that has made Paul such a great conveyor of chemometrics and other phenomena over the years. Another key to Paul's success has been building lasting relationships not only with students but also throughout academia and industry. Many of these relationships led to successful collaborations on research projects and opportunities for students to gain invaluable experience. An example would be Paul spending the summer of 1989 working in the laboratory automation group at Burroughs Wellcome with Alger Salt. Paul's goal was to provide tools to perform multicomponent ultraviolet (UV) spectroscopic analysis with the goal to develop a software suite to automate quantitative UV measurement and analysis for multiple components. He developed code that employed principle components analysis to the data generated by the automated system and was validated and successfully used for testing pharmaceutical dosage forms and in-process manufacturing samples. Another example would be the development of noninvasive identification of film-coated and nonfilm coated blister-packed tablets using NIR reflectance spectroscopy with Brian MacDonald to the use of UV/vis for dissolution monitoring and reaction trajectories. These exemplify the combination of industrial and academic partnerships improving processes developed. Some of these efforts evolved into process analytical technology (PAT), which went on to become a recognized practice within the pharmaceutical industry and FDA. Paul's relationship with his collaborators on these projects went beyond just the science and technology allowing industrial scientists to work directly with academics and students at ECU. All parties benefited greatly from this relationship across many spectroscopic applications and techniques leading to multiple papers, publications, and the development of commercial offerings. Paul's emphasis on the education and quality of the students was always clear to his collaborators and is reflected in their continued contributions to the pharmaceutical industry. I think that these interactions are summarized by a statement made by Dwight Walker (Burroughs Wellcome collaborator), “Being a relatively small community in NC, interactions went well beyond just the science as it's not often that you can publish a paper with a neighbor from-up the street.” Paul's research success did not go unnoticed within the ranks at ECU. Paul has moved into more administrative roles in recent years where he has a reputation as a very diligent, very fair, and very smart administrator and scientist. He started as the Associate Vice Chancellor for the Division of Research and Graduate Studies and is now the Dean of the Graduate School at ECU. When taking over the graduate school, there were significant problems and situations that required attention, and Paul methodically improved the efficiency and the tenor of the unit, to the point that the Graduate School is now recognized as one of the most respected and favored units on campus within which to work. He approached the challenges through a combination of changes to infrastructure, increased campus engagement, greater reliance on data analytics, renewed marketing, reallocation of resources, and quality improvement. Paul has become known and appreciated for informed decision making. Early on, he developed a Graduate School Fact Book that summarized data at the program level on (a) student demand/quality of applicant pools; (b) enrollment statistics; (c) degree production efficiency; (d) expenditure of assistantship and remission budgets; (e) student perception of program environment; and (f) faculty scholarly productivity. Paul's approach to leading the Graduate School at ECU seems to align well with his first principles data driven approach to chemometrics and reminds me of a mantra that Paul would repeat loud and often “look at the data.” As a former student of Paul's, I would like to personally thank him for the passion and vigor with which he approaches everything that he undertakes. During my time at ECU, Paul wore many different hats simultaneously while still making the time for his students. I and countless others have benefited and still benefit from your hard work, dedication to teaching, and your uncanny ability to “look at the data.” I know that I personally would not be where I am today without your contribution to my life story. I would like to thank Dr Heather Teague, Maryann Cuellar, Dr Ernst Bezemer, Dr Dwight Walker, Dr Michael Van Scott, and Dr Thomas McConnell for their contributions to this piece. Chemometrics ; Management science ; Chemistry ; Chromatography ; Engineering Various Chemistry Research Topics ; Spectroscopy and Chemometric Analyses