Meet Emma, PhD student at University of Luxembourg

You are working on a PhD. What is your topic?
My research focuses on persistent, mobile and toxic (PMT) compounds. These chemicals can travel long distances in the environment and often end up in water resources, including drinking water. Within this, I study transformation products—compounds formed during environmental degradation, water treatment, metabolism, and similar processes. I want to determine whether certain compounds break down into PMT transformation products and, if so, whether their precursors can be grouped based on structural features.

What initially drew you to the MSc in Analytical Chemistry?
By the end of my bachelor’s degree, I knew I wanted a master’s—partly for better job opportunities and partly because I wanted to learn more chemistry. I was debating between organic and analytical chemistry. I enjoyed reaction mechanisms in organic chemistry, but I found fragmentation mechanisms in analytical chemistry even more interesting. What tipped the balance was the type of lab work: I liked being in the lab, but synthesis wasn’t my favourite, and I preferred the data analysis in analytical chemistry. I was also interested in environmental pollution, which made analytical chemistry the better fit.

Looking back, what skills or experiences from the program have been the most directly useful in your current role?
I rely heavily on liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry, so I’m glad the program had strong coverage of both. Statistics and coding have also been essential. Beyond the coursework, I gained important research skills during my thesis and internships—experiment planning, scientific writing, and general research workflow.

What motivated you to pursue a PhD, and how did the MSc influence that decision?
I’ve always liked problem-solving and learning new things, which is basically the core of doing a PhD. I wanted to work in depth on a topic, and I was drawn to environmental contaminant monitoring—specifically, looking beyond routine analysis to find what might be missed.

What advice would you give MSc students who are considering a PhD path?
Get as much research experience as you can—internships, longer thesis projects, anything that gets you into the research environment. If you enjoy those, you’ll likely enjoy a PhD, and you’ll start with useful skills already in place. Also, be clear about what matters to you in a PhD position. They interview you, but you should be interviewing them just as critically. For me, the key factors were a supervisor I could work well with, a topic I cared about, and access to the necessary lab and computational resources.

How do you feel the field of analytical chemistry is evolving, and how should students position themselves?
I mostly see the research side, but there’s clear growth in non-target analysis and suspect screening, both for environmental samples and for metabolomics/lipidomics. There’s also a push to bring these methods into routine analysis, so students should get at least some familiarity with this type of work—especially the data processing, which is very different from target analysis. Programming is becoming useful for almost everyone. It takes time to learn, but it makes data analysis faster and more reproducible. With the rise of AI tools, it also helps to understand how these tools work so you know when to trust them and when not to.