Pieter De Gauquier

EDUCATION :

• June 2015: Bachelor in Biomedical Laboratorium Technologies (MLT) obtained at the Erasmushogeschool Brussel – Jette (Belgium)
• June 2019: Master in Drug Development (pharmacist) obtained at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) – Jette (Belgium)
• September 2019: Ph.D. Student at the department of Analytical Chemistry, Applied Chemometrics and Molecular Modelling (FABI), Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) – Jette (Belgium)

RESEARCH TOPICS :

• Supercritical fluid chromatography and liquid chromatography coupled with circular dichroism (CD) detector
• Molecular Dynamics and Quantitative Structure Enantioselective Retention Relationship (QSERR) models

RESEARCH PROJECT

Pieter’s PhD project will combine features of molecular dynamics with those of multivariate modelling to gain further insights on the enantiorecognition mechanisms in reversed-phase liquid chromatography (RPLC) and supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC). By means of Computational Fragment-Based Drug Design, fundamental insights into the recognition process will be used to guide the development and selection of appropriate chiral molecular descriptors. These latter will be inserted in Quantitative Structure Enantioselective Retention Relationship (QSERR) models that allow identifying the most important (chiral and achiral) descriptors, responsible for recognition and separation on a given chiral stationary phase. If good models are obtained, they will also allow prediction of the best chromatographic system to enable the separation of a new chiral compound.