People

Dr. James Harynuk received his PhD from the University of Waterloo in 2004 where he conducted pioneering work in the emerging field of comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography and won the WB Pearson Medal for creative research in a doctoral thesis. He then moved to Melbourne, Australia to continue the study of multidimensional separations with Dr. Philip Marriott at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. In 2007 he started his own research group at the University of Alberta where he continues to advance our understanding of multidimensional separations science. Current research interests include the development of tools to identify molecules based on their thermodynamic behavior in a gas phase separation and tools for the rapid interpretation of GCxGC and GC-MS data. The tools that Dr. Harynuk is developing have been applied in a diversity of fields with a variety of collaborators including petroleum (Syncrude, Imperial Oil), forensics (RCMP), foods (University of Jaen, Spain), anti-doping (UFRJ, Brazil), and textile science (UofA).

He has a special interest in using metabolomics to advance drug discovery and drug screening. He has developed several large libraries of biologically significant small molecules, including nucleotides, amino acid derivatives, ions, and lipids, as well as stabilizers such as osmolytes and short-chain polymers. This diverse library has been used to screen and identify novel ligands, profile binding specificities, and map interaction sites for a number of protein signaling and enzymatic domains (GTPases, kinases, phosphatases, and proteases). He also co-created an open access drug fragment library optimized by multiple drug discovery campaigns for high-throughput screening by NMR. The Membrane Optimal Docking Area (MODA) software he co-developed is freely available at Molsoft, providing a basis for further studies on specificities and cellular localization of the thousands of novel membrane binders (i.e., metabolites) that can now be easily predicted by any researcher.