For years, laboratory professionals gained knowledge through hands-on experience, personal interactions and discussions at forums, symposiums, workshops and seminars. Not much had changed since I embarked on my Ph.D. program in applied chemistry back in 2000. It took all but COVID-19 to radically shift the mode of learning — from face-to-face activities to a virtual platform. Today, virtual engagements for knowledge sharing have become the norm, and indirectly we are now closer together without the constraints of geographical and time differences.
The change is particularly striking in the Asia Pacific and Japan region (APJ), rich in different cultures and languages. The switch to online events and activities created opportunities for participants from different APJ geographies to connect, share and learn from each other as well as from global experts at the same time.
During the early days of the pandemic, Thermo Fisher Scientific quickly adapted our traditional outreach activities for knowledge sharing to online platforms for easy access and learning on-demand. These knowledge sharing sessions are held in English with English captions and translated into local languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
Working in close collaboration with our local colleagues, we focused on understanding participants’ needs and key issues, including food safety and environmental or trends such as Pharma 4.0 developments in Asia to offer the best online engagement and learning opportunities for the APJ scientific community.
A stronger and more knowledgeable community of APJ lab professionals
In 2021, we continue to engage the APJ scientific community on their learning and development journeys with the 2021 Chromatography Innovation Series. In late 2021, this Series evolved into the Innovation Summit – 2021 to include mass spectrometry innovations, increasing the levels of online engagement and virtual experiences. Discussion topics included the following:
- Innovations in GC and GC-MS technologies for analytical testing laboratories performing high-throughput analysis in the food safety, environmental, pharmaceutical, anti-doping and forensic toxicology sectors.
- Helping Asia’s pharma lab professionals address the challenges by creating opportunities to learn or adopt innovations, robust workflows and exchanging ideas among peers and pharma experts.
- New liquid chromatography (LC) and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) capabilities to empower lab professionals in research or applied markets such as proteomics, food, pharma/biopharma, and many others to power discovery, enable breakthroughs, deliver next-level quantitative productivity as well as performance.
- Interactive adventure of innovations and breakthroughs in ion chromatography (IC), the most dominant method in ion analysis and a significant chromatographic technique within the field of separation science.
We made both series fun and engaging with brain teaser challenges so that your learning journey is enjoyable and, at the same time, included a leaderboard for laboratory professionals who love a challenge. Although this leaderboard challenge will close at the end of November 2021, all the learning experiences continue to be available on-demand for the APJ scientific community.
Register for on-demand versions of these experiences at ThermoFisher.com/chrom-innovation.
Thermo Fisher Scientific
United States
