Our annual Milwaukee Analytical Chemistry Conference (MACC) was held on September 7th and 8th in the Kenwood IRC. The conference was titled “Mics” it up: Mass Spec for Dynamic and “Omics” and was supported by the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Milwaukee Institute for Drug Discovery. The two-day event was jam packed with sponsored Workshops such as Proteomics provided by ThermoFisher and MALDI provided by Shimadzu as well as a mixer and poster session, career fair and 3 featured lecturers including Tonya Zeczycki from the Brody School of Medicine, East Carolina University, Neil Kelleher from the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University, and Daniel Wahl from Radiation Oncology, Michigan Medicine at the University of Michigan. Day 1 had workshops on Proteomics, MALDI, Metabolomics, and Lipidomics.
After our several workshops, our first guest speaker, Tonya Zaczycki took to the stage with her presentation “A tale of two conformations: HDX-mass spectrometry and the drug discovery pipeline.” Day one closed out with dinner and mixer and a poster session. Graduate student Kayode Medubi received the best graduate poster award for this poster titled: “Derivatization and Optimization of a LCMS-MS method to quantify selective estrogen receptor β agonists to determine their pharmacokinetics” and SURF student Taif Al-Dulaimi received the best undergraduate poster award for her poster with the title: “Pre-clinical evaluation of new drug candidates for asthma and atopic dermatitis”.
Day two started early at 8 am with breakfast sponsored by A.O. Smith followed by our second featured lecturer, Neil Kelleher and his presentation “Label-free imaging of proteoforms in human tissues using individual ion MS.” Research presentations and lunch followed Neil’s lecture. The latter half of day two was filled with a career fair with presentations from Abbott, Accelerated Analytical Laboratories, and Sterling as well as interviews and advice from our very own guest lecturer Daniel Wahl.
He presented his lecture “Metabolomic approaches to measure and target altered metabolism in brain cancer.”