Alexander Makarov

Meet Alexander Makarov

Career highlight: It may not have felt this way at the time, but the commercial launch of the very first Orbitrap mass spectrometer (LTQ Orbitrap) is a definite highlight.

The future: MS is growing in a way akin to the civil aviation industry – commercially oriented, highly automated, regulated and specialized, and slow to change, but also indispensable in modern society.

Eureka moment: I’ve had many; when I finally understood how to inject ions into the Orbitrap analyzer for one, or more recently finding out why the ions of intact viruses could survive in the trap for abnormally long periods.