Prof. Ian Gilmore

National Physical Laboratory, UK
Prof. Ian Gilmore is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and Senior Fellow at the National Physical Laboratory. He is also a Visiting Professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Nottingham and founding director of the UK’s National Centre of Excellence in Mass Spectrometry (NiCE-MSI). He has made breakthroughs in high-resolution molecular imaging by mass spectrometry. His innovation of OrbiSIMS technology has had a wide impact across research in biomedicine and novel devices, revolutionising the ability to measure chemistry at surfaces and interfaces. Now commercialised, OrbiSIMS are being used around the world, giving ground-breaking insights into how neighbouring cells regulate each other’s metabolism, to map metabolic heterogeneity in cancer tumours and next generation biomaterials discovery. His research interests also include 3D molecular imaging of complex interfaces in organic electronics, batteries and additive manufactured devices.

Ian has over 30 years’ experience in mass spectrometry of surfaces and has published more than 160 peer-reviewed papers. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and the American Vacuum Society. Ian is the recipient of the Alfred Benninghoven prize and medal (2024), ECASIA Award (2024), IUVSTA Prize and gold medal for Technology (2022), the UKSAF Riviere prize (2013) and the IoP Paterson medal (2004).

EPS Invited Lecture
Talk title: OrbiSIMS – high resolution mass spectrometry imaging with simultaneous chemical identification and localisation with high confidence
Since the origins of secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), almost nine decades ago, the field has evolved along distinct pathways where a process of natural selection has seen the emergence and decline of techniques as they, in turn, are superseded by new innovations. This has resulted in today’s powerful SIMS instruments that are having extraordinary impact in almost every area of materials science and increasingly in the life-sciences [1]. However, independent evolutionary lineages have led to segmentation of the community. Recent advances in instrumentation and advances in fundamental understanding are now beginning to show prospects for evolutionary convergence.

To put this in context, recent developments driven by a fundamental analytical challenge will be discussed. Techniques, like nuclear magnetic resonance, provide high confidence in identification but with limited information on localisation. Whilst techniques like electron microscopy, give high confidence in localisation but low confidence in identification. This has been termed the “molecular uncertainty principle” [2]. In 2017, NPL introduced the OrbiSIMS technology [3] with an objective to simultaneously provide molecular identification and localisation as close to this limit as possible. Since then, the number of OrbiSIMS instruments around the world has increased significantly and the community of users and range of applications has grown. In this presentation, we briefly introduce the OrbiSIMS and use examples of the applications in advanced materials [4] and life-sciences [5] to highlight a convergence of “static SIMS” and “dynamic SIMS” as some of the traditional barriers begin to disappear. In a look to the future, further advances in mass spectrometers are expected, for example multiple reflection Time of Flight analysers, ion mobility and other novel hybrid analysers as well as improved sensitivity using quantum detection.

References
[1]       N. P. Lockyer et al. Secondary ion mass spectrometry, Nature reviews, methods primer, 2024
[2]       A Ali et al, Single cell metabolism: current and future trends. Metabolomics, 2022. 18 (10):
[3]       M K Passarelli et al., The 3D OrbiSIMS-label-free metabolic imaging with subcellular lateral resolution and high mass-resolving power, Nature Methods, 2017. 14 (12): p. 1175-
[4]       G F Trindade et al., Direct identification of interfacial degradation in blue OLEDs using nanoscale chemical depth profiling. Nature Communications, 2023. 14 (1): p. 8066.
[5]       F Zani et al., The dietary sweetener sucralose is a negative modulator of T cell-mediated responses. Nature, 2023. 615 (7953): p. 705-711.