Heidi Goenaga Infante Wins the 2023 European Award for Plasma Spectrochemistry

Heidi Goenaga Infante has won the 2023 European Award for Plasma Spectrochemistry. She will receive the award on February 3 at the European Winter Conference on Plasma Spectrochemistry 2023 (EWCPS 2023) in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where she will give a plenary talk, titled, “A Journey of Continued Contributions to Plasma Spectrochemistry: Focus on Metrology at the Nanoscale.”

The European Award for Plasma Spectrochemistry, which promotes analytical plasma spectrochemical developments and applications in Europe, is awarded for a single outstanding piece of work or for continued important contributions in the field. It is sponsored by Agilent Technologies, and the winner is selected by an independent panel of five prominent European scientists in plasma spectrochemistry and one representative from Agilent Technologies. The winner receives a prize of EUR 6000.

For more than 25 years, Goenaga Infante has been working in elemental and speciation analysis using a wide variety of inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) methodologies. Over the past 12 years, she has made substantial contributions to novel fractionation analysis techniques in the areas of elemental speciation, metallomics, and nanomaterials characterization. She has worked to reduce uncertainty and improve the sensitivity of speciation measurements, push the boundaries of analytical technology to enable multi-element species quantification and characterization in very small samples, such as cells, and to develop high-accuracy measurements for nanomaterial quantification in complex samples using complementary hyphenated ICP-MS approaches.

Goenaga Infante has also developed novel calibration strategies using tissue-matched calibrants and internal standardization (including isotope dilution analysis) for quantitative elemental imaging of tissue relevant to critical diseases. This work is currently being extended to single-cell inorganic metrology.

For the past 15 years Heidi's research activities have been carried out at LGC, where she is the chief scientist within the National Measurement Laboratory (NML) and as one of only four LGC science fellows. She is also a principal scientist and team leader of the Inorganic Analysis team of 15 doctoral and postdoctoral scientists, and the primary research supervisor of several PhD students from overseas universities and international metrology institutes.

To learn more about her work, see this interview in Spectroscopy.