Peter D. Wentzell 

Associate Professor

BSc (Dalhousie), PhD (Michigan State)

E-mail: peter.wentzell@dal.ca
Phone: (902) 494-3708
Fax: (902) 494-1310

* Accepting Graduate Students 
 
Research Interests: Analytical Chemistry. 

The primary focus of research is in the development of methods for the efficient extraction of information from chemical measurements, or chemometrics. Chemometrics has been broadly defined as the application of mathematical, statistical and formal logic methods to chemistry. Computers figure prominently in the work and solutions to problems often rely on multidisciplinary approaches. The role of analytical chemistry in society has changed dramatically in the past couple of decades and the types of information analytical chemists are asked to provide can have far-reaching implications. The field of chemometrics has grown rapidly, fueled by this need for new information and the proliferation of complex instrumentation capable of providing vast amounts of data. These trends will undoubtedly continue into the future, making the role of chemometrics even more vital. Dr. Wentzell's interests encompass both fundamental and applied aspects of chemometrics and touch on many other areas, including environmental, biological, forensic, and clinical chemistry. Problems of interest include pattern recognition, modelling, multivariate calibration, digital filtering, curve resolution, and optimization. These are multivariate problems. In contrast to traditional analytical methods, which often required only one measurement per sample, modern techniques will often produce many measurements per sample. Chemometrics allows the extraction of qualitative (e.g. classification) or quantitative (e.g. property prediction) information from these data that may not have been easily accessible before. Meeting these challenges often require using methods that are at the forefront of research, such as artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms. Dr. Wentzell is interested in exploring the limitations and potential of such methods in a variety of real-world applications. 
 
Visit Our Lab: Labratory for Chemometrics

Selected Publications: See list.