Michael Myrick Receives Gerald S. Birth Award from the Council for Near Infrared Spectroscopy

The Council for Near Infrared Spectroscopy (CNIRS) has awarded Michael (Micky) Myrick with the Gerald Birth Award for best work in diffuse spectroscopy published in 2010 to 2011. Myrick has worked on the development of an instrument for imaging forensic samples in the thermal infrared region. The work is detailed in a series of three papers titled “Multimode Imaging in the Thermal Infrared for Chemical Contrast Enhancement,” published in Analytical Chemistry (2010) 82: 8412-8420, 8421-8426, and 8427-8431.

Part 1 described the instrumentation and methodology. Part 2 reported on simulation-driven design, and Part 3 described how blood could be visualized on fabrics. The papers were co-authored with Heather Brooke, Megan R. Baranowski, Jessica N. McCutchoen, and Stephen L. Morgan. The award, lecture, and symposium were presented at the 16th International Conference on Diffuse Reflectance (IDRC) at Chambersburg, PA, August 2012.

Myrick, president of the Coblentz Society, 2011 - 2013, and a member of Spectroscopy’s Editorial Advisory Board, is a professor of chemistry at the University of South Carolina (Columbia, South Caroline) and has been a visiting scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Livermore, California) from 1995 to the present. He is the author of more than 160 peer-reviewed or invited publications and is the inventor of multivariate optical computing.

The Gerald S. Birth Award for an outstanding publication describing innovation in diffuse reflection or diffuse transmission spectroscopy is conferred by the CNIRS and sponsored by Unity Scientific Corporation (Brookfield, Connecticut) in memory of Gerald Birth, the founder of the IDRC, now sponsored by the CNIRS.