Christine M. Mahoney

Christine Mahoney’s research interests lie primarily in the development and application of Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS) and other surface analysis techniques for characterization of organic and polymeric based materials. Her biggest contribution to the field has been in the development of cluster SIMS technology for 3-D imaging in polymeric based biomaterials, where she has been involved in collaborations with the FDA and several drug companies to characterize several real and model drug delivery systems. She is currently working to obtain a better understanding of the basic chemistry of cluster ion bombardment of soft materials, and the conditions that are required for optimum sputter removal. Her long term goal is to develop and optimize SIMS technology for 3-D molecular imaging in cells. In addition to organic and polymeric depth profiling, Christine is currently working to develop SIMS as a tool for forensics analysis, where she employs multivariate statistical analysis approaches, such as principal components analysis (PCA) to differentiate between samples (typically explosives) of varying origins.