I grew up in a region of Flanders, Belgium, known as the “Texas of Flanders” because of its entrepreneurship and bustling small family businesses. At the end of 1985, I had some tough discussions about the research program in separation sciences within our department at Ghent University. My proposals were not taken seriously. Based on my ‘innate entrepreneurship’ and the fact that industrial collaboration was not really accepted in an academic environment at that time, I decided to quit the university on February 1, 1986. And I had a plan.

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About the Author

Pat Sandra

Pat Sandra is Emeritus Professor of Organic Chemistry at Ghent University, and Founder and President of the Research Institute for Chromatography (RIC), Kortrijk, Belgium. “Through the activities of RIC, I got in touch with the real analytical needs of the industry and found we could help in providing solutions that are economically relevant. Moreover, it allowed me to keep my best PhD students around me, which resulted in high scientific output in a non-academic environment,” he says.