Dr. Javier Hernández-Borges is Full Professor of Analytical Chemistry (2022) of the Department of Chemistry at the University of La Laguna (ULL) in Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain). He obtained his Bachelor in Chemistry at the ULL in 2001 as well as his PhD with European mention at that university in 2005 (obtaining also ULL’s PhD Thesis Extraordinary Award), after which, he carried out a postdoctoral stay at the Institute of Chemical Methodologies of the National Research Council of Italy (2006-2007), obtained a Juan de la Cierva contract at the Canarian Institute of Agrarian Research (2007-2008) and a Ramon y Cajal contract at the ULL (2009-2013). Afterwards, he was promoted to Associate professor (2014) and Associate Professor with tenure (2017). He has published around 145 papers in international indexed journals and 32 book chapters, most of them dealing with analytical method development, in particular, with the determination of microplastics, pesticides, antibiotics, phthalates and estrogenic compounds residues in Environmental and food matrices using mainly chromatographic and electromigration techniques also coupled to mass spectrometry detection. He has been the PI of several international, national, regional and private foundations projects. He has also directed 9 PhD Thesis, 7 of them awarded with the ULL’s PhD Extraordinary Award, as well as an important number of Bachelor’s Final Degree and Master’s Degree Projects.Since 2018, he is coordinator of the Applied Analytical Chemistry Research Group (AChem) at the ULL, which incorporated from the very beginning a pioneer research line at the university devoted to microplastics research, trying to follow a multidisciplinary approach. In particular, his group has been studying the presence of microplastics in air, soils, food, coastal and deep-sea sediments and also in the water column, monitoring environmental contaminants in microplastics, and determining the microplastic content in different living organisms as well as improving analytical methodologies for microplastics determination and analysis. He is currently member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Adv. Sample Prep., and J. Chromatogr. Open, Associate Editor of Front. Anal. Sci. and has also been Editor of several Special Issues for JCR journals. He has been chairman of two 2 international conferences in the Analytical Chemistry area (ITP2023 and ExTech2023) as well as member of the Scientific and Organizing Committee of other National and International congresses. Since 2020 he is the President of the Territorial Section of the Canary Islands of the Royal Spanish Society of Chemistry (RSEQ) after serving for two years as Secretary. Dr. Regina Duarte obtained a degree in Analytical Chemistry (1998), a MSc in Sciences of the Coastal Zone (2001), and a PhD in Chemistry (2006), all at the University of Aveiro. Currently, she is Principal Researcher at the Centre for Environmental and Marine Studies (CESAM) at University of Aveiro. Her research is focused on the development of new multidimensional analytical research strategies aiming at understanding the structural features of natural organic matter and its interactions with contaminants of environmental interest, mainly in atmospheric and aquatic systems. She has coordinated/participated in several multidisciplinary research projects related to the characterization of complex organic matrices from atmospheric particles, water and soils. She has authored/co-authored more than 40 peer-reviewed publications. Prof. Armando C. Duarte (http://www.cesam.ua.pt/aduarte) graduated in Chemical Engineering (1977) at the University of Oporto (Portugal) and obtained a PhD in Public Health Engineering (1981) at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (United Kingdom). In 2006, The Portuguese Science Foundation (www.fct.pt) awarded him a prize for Scientific Excellence and in 2013 he became a Member of the FCT Scientific Council for Natural and Environmental Sciences. He is a Professor of Environmental & Analytical Chemistry at the University of Aveiro (Portugal) since 1995, leader of a research group on the same subject, lecturer on Anaytical Quality Control subjects, and either supervising or co-supervising many PhD students, some of whom became members of staff, both as lecturers and researchers. His highly-interdisciplinary research spans areas of comprehensive environmental and analytical chemistry, qualimetrics and analytical quality assurance, but also includes the assessment of the relevance of new concepts and integration of different ideas into widely accepted frameworks, especially when applied to sustainability. He co-authored more than 450 peer-reviewed publications leading to an h-factor of 38.
