Dr. Alexandre Shvartsburg grew up and got his undergraduate education in Russia. He moved to analytical chemistry in USA, earning an M.S. from the U. of Nevada (1995) and Ph.D from Northwestern (1999). After an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship at York University (Toronto, Canada) and stint at the US Food and Drug Administration in Jefferson (Arkansas), he moved to the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (Richland, WA) in 2003 and academia in Wichita State in 2014. He has also started a small company Heartland MS that makes the FAIMS and ion funnel systems for mass spectrometry available to other researchers. His awards include the John Polanyi Prize of Ontario, M.T. Thomas Award of PNNL, Federal Laboratory Consortium and two R&D 100 awards, NSF CAREER, and the US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

His primary research interests are in the technology and new applications of ion mobility separations (IMS) in conjunction with mass spectrometry. His lab focuses on the novel nonlinear approaches of differential or field asymmetric waveform IMS (FAIMS) that leverage the dependence of ion transport properties in gases on the electric field strength. They have constructed planar-gap FAIMS systems with highest resolving power ever achieved - up to 500 for multiply-charged ions. This performance allows previously unthinkable analyses, such as the baseline separations of PTM localization variants for modified peptides, glycopeptides with glycan-level isomerism, individual protein conformers, various lipid isomers, and even isotopologues and isotopomers. These efforts are pursued in collaboration with major instrument companies, including Shimadzu and Thermo. To optimize the IMS methods and extract the ion structures from measured cross sections, he also advances the first-principles methods for ion mobility calculations and has developed the prevalent molecular dynamics approach and software (MobCal) for that purpose.