Bruce R. Kowalski Award in Chemometrics administered by the Society for Applied Spectroscopy

Presented in honor of the legacy of Professor Kowalski by recognizing outstanding young researchers in the field of chemometrics and by extension, for advanced mathematical and/or statistical methods in chemistry

Keshav Kumar obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, India, in year of 2008 and 2014, respectively. His PhD research work was focused on integrating the chemometric methods with Total Synchronous Fluorescence Spectroscopy (TSFS). He showed that TSFS data structure is intrinsically different and a better understanding is required for its integration with different chemometric techniques. One of his most significant contributions in this area is to prove that TSFS data set lacks the trilinear structure and must not be subjected to the parallel factor (PARAFAC) analysis. He has also successfully proposed a scheme that provides a computationally economical way of achieving trilinear decomposition of TSFS data sets using PARAFAC analysis. He has been successful in studying various aspects of performing Multivariate Curve Resolution Alternating Least Square (MCR-ALS) analysis of TSFS data sets. In a comparative study, he found that combination of chemometrics and TSFS provide quite a few significant analytical advantages over combination of excitation-emission matrix fluorescence (EEMF)-chemometrics for the analyses of dilute aqueous multifluorophoric mixtures.
He received the Best PhD and MSc Thesis award, from Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute
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of Technology-Madras. He received KBC postdoctoral fellowship from Kempe Foundation, Sweden in 2015 and since then he is working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Molecular biology, Umea University, Sweden. His current research mainly deals with the application of advanced chemometric methods on the chromatographic and mass spectrometry data sets to identify the novel bacterial cell wall targets.