Start your PSE 2026 experience with a special pre-conference event on the morning of 15 September 2026.
A dedicated session on Centrifugal Partition Chromatography (CPC) will take place before the official opening of the conference. Participation is free of charge, but registration (see below) is recommended to help us organize the event.
Diving into the world of biphasic liquid systems: a centrifugal partition chromatography workshop
Simon Vlad Luca,a Krystyna Skalicka-Wozniak,b
aInstitute of Organic and Analytical Chemistry, University of Orleans, France
bDepartment of Chemistry of Natural Products, Medical University of Lublin, Poland
This interactive workshop offers a comprehensive introduction to Centrifugal Partition Chromatography (CPC), a powerful support-free liquid-liquid separation technique increasingly employed for the purification of natural products, pharmaceuticals, food ingredients, and other high-value compounds. Through a combination of lectures, guided discussions, and real-world case studies, participants will gain both a strong theoretical foundation and practical insight into CPC method development.
The workshop will cover the fundamentals of liquid-liquid partitioning, the operating principles of CPC, and the advantages of support-free chromatography over conventional solid-phase techniques. Participants will explore the different CPC instrument configurations, operating modes, and key considerations for successful separations.
A major focus will be placed on biphasic solvent system selection, the cornerstone of CPC method development. Interactive examples will demonstrate efficient screening strategies and illustrate how systematic adjustments in solvent composition, acidity, and basicity govern compound partitioning and separation selectivity. Participants will be encouraged to analyze separation challenges, discuss solvent system design, and interpret representative chromatographic results from natural product purification.
By the end of the workshop, attendees will have acquired a basic understanding of CPC principles, solvent system design strategies, instrument operation, and method optimization, providing them with the knowledge and confidence to implement CPC effectively in their own research.
About the speakers
Simon Vlad Luca studied Pharmacy at Grigore T. Popa University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Iasi (Romania). He earned his PhD in 2019 through a joint doctoral program with the same university and the Medical University of Lublin (Poland). His research focused on CCC/CPC-based isolation of bioactive natural products with anti-inflammatory, central nervous system, anticancer, and antimicrobial properties. In 2019, he began working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Munich (Germany), where he focused on computer-aided and model-based approaches, as well as advanced operating modes of CCC/CPC, for the isolation of pharmaceutically relevant natural products. In December 2024, he was appointed a tenure-track professor at the Institute of Organic and Analytical Chemistry, University of Orléans (France), where he continues his work on the discovery of bioactive natural products. From January to July 2025, he undertook a Fulbright Visiting Scholar stay at the University of Illinois Chicago (United States), where he worked on tracking the residual complexity of plant extracts using a combination of CPC and NMR.
Krystyna Skalicka-Woźniak received her MSc and PhD (Hons) from the Medical University of Lublin, Poland (Faculty of Pharmacy). She obtained a full professor title in 2019. Since 2019, she has been the Head of the Department of Natural Products Chemistry, Faculty of Pharmacy, Medical University of Lublin, Poland. In 2019, she also became a Visiting Prof. at the University of Bern, Institute of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine (Switzerland). Her research interests include the identification of bioactive compounds in plants, the optimization of modern extraction techniques, and chromatographic separation. The focus of her work for the last 20 years has been the application of countercurrent chromatography (CCC) for the isolation of biologically active secondary metabolites, especially coumarins and terpenoids, and examining their influence on the Central Nervous System (epilepsy, anxiety, and memory-related behavior). She gained her experience with CCC through an extended training period at a world-leading research center in the subject, the Institute of Bioengineering at Brunel University in London. Currently, her group is the leading practitioner of this technique in Poland.
Contact: simon-vlad.luca@univ-orleans.fr
Contact: kskalicka@pharmacognosy.org
PSE Meeting 2026 