McLean Research Group Laboratory for Structural Mass Spectrometry

Ben grew up in the mountains of Huntsville, Tennessee. He received his B.S. in Chemistry from Carson-Newman University in Jefferson City, Tennessee, where he conducted undergraduate research characterizing human phthalate exposure from plastic food containers using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) under the supervision of Dr. Christine Dalton.

Ben joined the McLean Research Group in January of 2022. His dissertation focuses on developing ion mobility-mass spectrometry (IM-MS) methods to separate small molecule drug enantiomers. This work, a collaboration with researchers at Pfizer, explores a variety of noncovalent complexation strategies to impart enantiospecific structural differences on chiral pairs—importantly, these differences can be elucidated with high-resolution ion mobility (HRIM) techniques. Importantly, results from this work have key implications for fields beyond analytical chemistry, with critical applications in drug quality control, metabolomics, and even green chemistry.