Brazilians Love For Mass Spectrometry

“Brazilians are known for loving fast cars, music, and football but recently we felt in love with another marvelous thing; science and most intensely, mass spectrometry.”

The Journal of Mass Spectrometry is proud to announce the appointment of Professor Marcos N. Eberlin, University of Campinas, Brazil, to Associate Editor. Professor Marcos Eberlin has helped changed the face of mass spectrometry in his native Brazil.

“I learned during high school that chemistry can be quite boring, when it comes, for instance, to memorizing nomenclature and formulae,” recalls Professor Eberlin. “But with mass spectrometry, we have direct access to the marvelous molecular world of molecules and molecular machines and discover the beauty and fascinating complexity of chemistry thus understanding its most superb intelligence … That’s when chemistry is really amazing.”

It was an “illuminated” teacher at university who called his attention to the great future of mass spectrometry. By that time mass spectrometry was the “ugly duckling” of science but his teacher predicted that it would one day become the beautiful swan. Time proved that he was right eventually swaying Marcos away from synthetic chemistry and into mass spectrometry. Indeed many may say that it was a pivotal moment for mass spectrometry in Brazil.

“Twenty years ago, you could count the number of mass spectrometrists in my country on the fingers of two hands but today, when we attend Brazilian Mass Spectrometry Society (BrMASS) conferences, many hundreds attend from Brazil and all South America and over the world. Today Brazilians are developing new techniques, working on new MS applications, founding MS laboratories equipped with state-of-the art instrumentation, publishing and doing MS science in an effervescent way as ever before and in a truly pioneering fashion; Brazil today is the place to be for MS.”

As founder of the Thomson Mass Spectrometry Laboratory at the University of Campinas, Professor Eberlin has guided the lab to international acclaim as a leader in the development of MS techniques and applications. He is widely known for his intense and multidisciplinary MS research in gas phase ion chemistry and in the development of new MS techniques such as easy ambient sonic spray ionization mass spectrometry (EASI-MS). Today Marcos and his group rely solely on MS to untangle the complexities of his most challenging projects.

Professor Eberlin has authored over 450 scientific manuscripts, and supervised more than a hundred master, PhD and pos-doc students. He currently supervises a group of 45 students and collaborators and now serves as associate editor of the Journal of Mass Spectrometry. He is also the president of the International Mass Spectrometry Foundation and vice president of the Brazilian Mass Spectrometry Society, whose roster has swelled to more than 1,800 members. His work has also earned him numerous awards.