Franz Hillenkamp
| Franz Hillenkamp | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
March 18, 1936 Essen, Germany |
| Died | August 22, 2014 (aged 78) Münster, Germany |
| Residence | Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Known for |
Laser microprobe mass analyzer Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization |
| Awards | Distinguished Contribution in Mass Spectrometry (1997) Thomson Medal (2003) Karl Heinz Beckurts Award (2003) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Chemistry |
| Institutions | University of Münster |
Franz Hillenkamp (March 18, 1936 – August 22, 2014) was a German scientist known for his development of the laser microprobe mass analyzer and, with Michael Karas, matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI).
Franz Hillenkamp was born in 1936 in Essen, Germany. He attended high school in Lünen, graduating in 1955. He received a M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 1961. He received a Ph.D. (Dr.-Ing.) from the Technische Universität München in 1966 with a thesis entitled “An Absolutely Calibrated Calorimeter for the Measurement of Pulsed Laser Radiation.”
Hillenkamp was a professor at Goethe University Frankfurt in Frankfurt from 1982 to 1986. In 1986, he became a professor on the Medical Faculty of the University of Münster where he remained until his retirement in 2001.
In 1973, Hillenkamp developed a high performance laser microprobe mass spectrometer with a spatial resolution of 0.5 µm and sub-attogram limit of detection for lithium atoms. This instrument was commercialized as the LAMMA 500 and was one of the first laser desorption mass spectrometers to be used for mass spectrometry imaging of tissue. The later LAMMA 1000 was also based on a Hillenkamp design.
In 1985, Hillenkamp and his colleague Michael Karas used a LAMMA 1000 mass spectrometer to demonstrate the technique of matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI). MALDI is an ionization method used in mass spectrometry, allowing the analysis of large biopolymers. Although Karas and Hillenkamp were the first to discover MALDI, Japanese engineer Koichi Tanaka was the first to use a similar method in 1988 to ionize proteins and shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002 for that work. Karas and Hillenkamp reported MALDI of proteins a few months later. The MALDI method of Karas and Hillenkamp subsequently became the much more widely used method.
...
Wikipedia