Society for Applied Spectrosocpy Fellows Award

Recognizes individual members for their outstanding service to the field of spectroscopy and the Society for Applied Spectroscopy.

Colin Bain

Colin Bain was educated at Cambridge, England and Harvard, USA, where he completed a PhD under the guidance of Prof. George Whitesides on self-assembled monolayers (SAMs).  During his PhD, he developed XPS as a quantitative tool for characterising the composition, structure and reactivity of SAMs. In 1988 he returned to the UK and established the UK’s first sum-frequency spectrometer, working with Paul Davies at Cambridge University. His particular interest was in the structure and phase behaviour of surfactant films at interfaces. In 1991 he moved to a University Lectureship at Oxford University and in 2005 to a Chair at Durham University. His research is characterised by the application a suite of surface-sensitive techniques to the structure and dynamics of organic molecules at fluid interfaces, which often involves applying techniques in new ways.  For example, he was the first to apply neutron reflectivity to flowing liquid surfaces and ellipsometry to high-speed jets. Recently, he has focussed on the development of total internal reflection Raman scattering for surface characterisation, including an imaging version for measurement of composition and phase separation in real time. He collaborates widely with industry in areas such as inkjet printing, lubrication, display technology, surfactant-enhanced oil recovery, agrochemicals and personal care products.  Awards for his work include the Corday-Morgan and Tilden Medals of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Craig Lectureship at Australian National University, the Founder’s Lecture at the National Chemical Laboratory in Pune, the Lectureship Award of the Japanese Chemical Society and the Thomas Graham Lectureship (jointly awarded by the SCI and RSC).

Katherine A. Bakeev

Dr. Katherine A. Bakeev is the Director of Analytical Services and Support for B&W Tek in Delaware. She has many years of industrial experience in the electronics, chemical and pharmaceutical industries, with companies including GlaxoSmithKline, CAMO Software and Foss NIRSystems.  Katherine earned her PhD in Polymer Science and Engineering from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst has a Masters in Technology Management from Stevens Institute of Technology, and a BS in Macromolecular Science from Case Western Reserve University.

She is the author of numerous articles and edited a book on Process Analytical Technology, now in its second edition. She is the recipient of the 2007 Craver Award in Applied Vibrational Spectroscopy.

She has been a member of the Society of Applied Spectroscopy (SAS) since 1993, serving on the Executive Committee from 2010-2014, and continues to serves on various SAS committees. She serves on the Editorial Board of the journal Applied Spectroscopy and for NIRNews.  She is the past president of SAS and the Council for Near Infrared Spectroscopy (CNIRS), and a member of the Coblentz Society, ACS, and the International Council for Near Infrared Spectroscopy (ICNIRS).

Rohit Bhargava

Rohit Bhargava received dual B.Tech. degrees (in Chemical Engineering and Polymer Science and Engineering) from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi in 1996. Subsequently, his doctoral thesis work at Case Western Reserve University was in the area of polymer spectroscopy and infrared imaging. As a Research Fellow at the NIH (2000-2005), he developed infrared imaging technology and its applications in cancer pathology. Rohit has been at Illinois since as Assistant Professor (2005-2011), Associate Professor (2011-2012) and Professor (2012-). Research in the Bhargava laboratories focuses on theory and simulation for spectroscopic imaging, developing new instrumentation and making chemical imaging practical for digital molecular pathology in cancer. Using 3D printing and engineered tumor models, his recent research seeks to elucidate the biology and physical aspects of hetero-cellular interactions in cancer progression. Among recent national honors for spectroscopy research are the Meggers Award (Society for Applied Spectroscopy, 2014), Craver Award (Coblentz Society, 2013) and the FACSS Innovation Award (2012). Earlier in his career, Rohit was the first assistant professor hired into the new Bioengineering department at Illinois and played a key role in the development of its curriculum and activities. His dedication to education on campus is recognized (Rose and Everitt awards) and he is routinely nominated to the list of teachers ranked excellent. Among his recent educational innovations is the development of a challenge-inspired model for undergraduate education and its use in the Cancer Scholars Program.

David Cremers

David Cremers received his Ph.D. (physics) from Washington State University.  His dissertation work involved picosecond laser-based flash photolysis.  He joined Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1980 as a Postdoctoral Fellow to develop ultra-sensitive optical methods of chemical detection.  In 1981 he became a staff member at the Laboratory and began developing laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) for a variety of defense and industrial applications.  These applications included chemical agent detection, the detection of toxic airborne metals, and industrial process control such as real-time molten steel monitoring.  Dr. Cremers also worked on other methods of chemical detection based on Raman and fluorescence spectroscopy.  In the early 1990’s, he along with other LIBS team members, demonstrated open path stand-off LIBS for elemental analysis, the basis of the technique deployed on the Mars Science Laboratory for laser-based stand-off interrogation of geological samples.  In 2005, Dr. Cremers joined Applied Research Associates, Inc. (Albuquerque, NM) to continue research and development of laser plasma based technologies with emphasis on LIBS instrumentation for nuclear, radiological, and bio-detection.

Dr. Cremers has extensive expertise in developing LIBS instrumentation.  He has received five R&D-100 Awards for instrument development, four of these relating to LIBS technology.  He holds seven patents for optical based technologies including LIBS.  Dr. Cremers has over 50 publications in referred scientific journals dealing with laser plasmas and the LIBS method.  He has also co-authored the second edition of the “Handbook of LIBS” for John Wiley (2013).

Richard A. Dluhy

Richard A. Dluhy received his Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry from Rutgers University in 1983. He was a research associate at the National Research Council of Canada, Ottawa, and a senior research scientist at Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus, OH, before joining the University of Georgia, where he was an Associate and Full Professor of Chemistry. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Bordeaux, a Alexander von Humbolt award scholar at the Max Planck Institute and a DAAD award recipient at the Robert Koch Institut. At UGA, he has been the Associate Head of the Department of Chemistry, and the Director of the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center.  His research interests are in biophysical and biomedical vibrational spectroscopy using physically and chemically self-assembled nanomaterials with applications to opto-electronics, sensors and biomaterials.  He is a co-founder and President of Argent Diagnostics, Inc., a new start-up company in Athens, GA, dedicated to commercialization of nano photonics in biomedical diagnostics. As of July 2015, he was named Professor and Chairman of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Roy Goodacre

Roy Goodacre is Professor of Biological Chemistry at the University of Manchester, UK.  His group’s main areas of research are broadly within analytical biotechnology and systems biology, specifically involving Raman spectroscopy, FT-IR and mass spectrometry.  He also develops advanced data analyses (chemometrics) which are needed for the interpretation of these spectroscopic, mass spectrometric and metabolomics data.

Over the last decade or so his group has developed a variety of Raman spectroscopy methods.  These include surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) and UV resonance Raman spectroscopy for the identification of bacteria and their metabolic products, and more recently live cell Raman for single cell analysis, as well as SERS for multiplexed detection and quantification of a variety of analytes.

Roy is the Editor-in-chief of the journal Metabolomics and on the editorial advisory boards of Analyst and Journal of Analytical and Applied Pyrolysis.  Finally, he is a founding director of the Metabolomics Society, and a director of the Metabolic Profiling Forum. 

Detlaf Günther

Detlef Günther was born in Köthen, Germany in 1963. He obtained his Diploma degree in Chemistry in 1987 and a Ph.D. degree in Analytical Chemistry from the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg under supervision of L. Moenke - Blankenburg in 1990. After carrying out postdoctoral work in the Institute of Plant Biochemistry Halle where he worked on the development of analytical methods to characterize heavy metal-binding proteins using HPLC-ICP-MS, he joined the group of H.P. Longerich at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. From 1995 until 1998 he was in the group of C.A. Heinrich at the Institute of Isotope Geology and Mineral Resources at ETH Zürich. In 1998 he was appointed Assistant Professor in the Laboratory of Inorganic Chemistry at the ETH Zürich. He was promoted to Associate Professor for Trace Element and Micro Analysis in 2003 and became Full Professor in 2008. From 2010 until 2012 he was Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences at ETH Zurich and since 2015 he is Vice President for Research and Corporate Relations at ETH Zurich. He is recipient of the Ruzicka Award (2002), the European Award for Plasma Spectrochemistry (2003), the Fresenius Award (2007), and the Lester Strock Award (2007), and he received in 2013 the “Einstein Visiting Fellowship” to Humboldt University Berlin (Germany) and the “Thousand Talent Fellowship” (Wuhan University, China). In 2014 he became a member of the German National Academy of Science Leopoldina.  His research program focuses on fundamental and applied studies in inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) and laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS), including studies on laser- sample interaction, aerosol transport, and plasma-related excitation processes. As well particle plasma interaction and particle vaporization for single nanoparticle analysis have been studied. Fundamental processes of UV-ns and UV-fs laser ablation used with Q-ICP-MS, SF-ICP-MS, TOF-ICP-MS, and MC-ICP-MS as well as alternative excitation sources, such as glow discharge are currently under investigation. The improvements in trace element and microanalysis and isotope ratio determinations have been demonstrated on a wide variety of applications (e.g., quantification of fluid inclusions, gemstones, metals, minerals, ceramic, and various nano materials).

David Hahn

David Hahn received his BSME (1986) and PhD (1992) degrees from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.  Following graduation, he was a National Research Council Research Associate at the US Food and Drug Administration (1992-1994) where he worked on laser-tissue interactions, and then a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories (1994-1998), in the Combustion Research Facility and in the Exploratory Systems Group, where he first worked on LIBS.  David joined the University of Florida (Gainesville, FL) in 1998, was promoted to Professor in 2007, and since June 2011 has served as Department Chair of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. His research and teaching interests are in the general area of transport, optical-based sensing and diagnostics, with applications to laser-material interactions.  He has published over 100 journal papers and book chapters and has 9 US patents.  He currently serves on the Editorial Board of Spectrochimica Acta Part B, the Publication Committee for SAS, and on the Board of Directors of the Doolittle Institute, a US Air Forced funded non-profit institute chartered to foster innovation and collaboration between industry, academia and government.  While at UF, he has won the College of Engineering 2007-2008 Teacher/Scholar of the Year Award, and the 2009-2010 Doctoral Dissertation Advisor/Mentoring Award.  He was recipient of the SAS 2011 Lester W. Strock Award for his work on laser-induced plasma spectroscopy, and received the 2013-2014 Distinguished Alumnus Award from LSU’s Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering.  He is a Fellow of ASME.

Takeshi Hasegawa

Professor Takeshi Hasegawa started his research carrier from the analysis of Langmuir-Blodgett films by infrared external-reflection (IR ER) spectroscopy on an electrodynamics framework under the direction of Professor Tohru Takenaka and Professor Junzo Umemura, pioneers in this field. In this series of studies, he deduced new convenient equations, in which the optical anisotropy is taken into account in a uniquely simple way. Due to the theory, the molecular orientation analysis in an ultrathin film was made a familiar task for surface chemists, which contributed to vibrational spectroscopy greatly.

He made further outstanding achievements after he obtained a position: the experimental and theoretical establishments of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Multiple-Angle Incidence Resolution Spectrometry (MAIRS). PCA is a most well-known chemometric technique, but he first pointed out that a very minute signal can be extracted from very strong background signals. He demonstrated an impressive work that non-resonance Raman spectra were separated from strong backgrounds of fluorescence. The theory is established, and it enhances the potentials of vibrational spectroscopy.

MAIRS is his original outstanding achievement, which is a powerful and unique spectroscopic tool for analyzing thin films on solid substrates. The uniqueness of this technique exists in the use of “virtual light” that oscillates electric field along the traveling direction. By incorporating the virtual light in his optical theory, the spectra arising from dipole transitions parallel and perpendicular to the substrate surface can be obtained separately from a set of (reflection or transmission) spectra collected at different incident angles, which enables accurate determination of molecular orientation in thin films without any assumptions. One can understand the advantage of this technique as follows. For observing dipole transitions parallel and perpendicular to the surface, a set of spectra must be measured in both transmission and reflection modes in the conventional surface spectroscopy. That is, two different substrates, highly reflective one (metal) and transparent one, are required. This strategy cannot be used in bioanalysis because biomolecules are often denaturated on metallic surfaces due to strong interactions. Professor Hasegawa experimentally and theoretically demonstrated that orientations of biomolecules on transparent substrate can be determined only from transmission spectra. No requirement of assumption is another advantage. In conventional optical theories based on the Fresnel’s equations, the refractive indices of the molecules at a frequency far from the absorption must be assumed. The removal of the assumption enables accurate determination of molecular orientation.

In this manner, the spectroscopic techniques that Professor Hasegawa developed are unique and useful. Due to these outstanding achievements, he received not only the Craver Award, but also Yamazaki-Teiichi prize, Dr. Masao Horiba Award, Awards from The Japan Society for Analytical Chemistry, etc.). His research in the area of vibrational spectroscopy has thus already garnered an international reputation.

Paul Pudney

Paul has a BSc in chemistry from Liverpool University and obtained a PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of East Anglia ‘Spectroscopic studies of adsorbates on metal single crystal surfaces’ under supervision of Prof Michael Chesters . After post doctoral studies at the Leverhulme Centre for Innovative Catalysis and the Interdisciplinary Research centre in Surface Science at Liverpool University he worked at the synchrotron at Daresbury before joining Unilever in 1994.

Paul is now a science leader in vibrational spectroscopy in Unilever Discover’s, strategic science group. He has applied spectroscopy in a number of innovative ways to gain further understanding of both consumer products and their behaviour when they interact with our consumers. Examples include quantifying the complex microstructures of soft solid materials by confocal Raman spectroscopy such as foods and behaviour of molecules in ice using IR. He developed a novel in-situ Triboligical Raman instrument to help understand lubrication in a Soft Elasto-Hydrodynamic Contact to understand ‘feel’. He has developed in-vivo Raman spectroscopic capability to measure and understand the delivery of actives to and their effect on the body, such as to the skin, scalp, axilla and oral mucosa as well as hair.

He has ~60 peer reviewed publications. He was nominated as one of the ‘Prominent Young Vibrational Spectroscopists’ in special addition of Vibrational Spectroscopy journal in 2004. He won the Meggers award in 2013, as well being runner up in 2012.