Robin Turner and James Piret Receive 2022 William F. Meggers Award

Robin F.B. Turner and James M. Piret are the winners of the 2022 William F. Meggers Award, to be presented this fall at the SciX conference, which will be held October 2–7 at the Northern Kentucky Convention Center in Greater Cincinnati. The Meggers Award, from the Society for Applied Spectroscopy, is given to the authors of the outstanding paper appearing in the journal Applied Spectroscopy. It is presented at the SciX conference in the year following the calendar year of publication.

Robin F.B. Turner

James M. Piret

Turner and Piret are receiving the award for their paper, “Augmented Two-Dimensional Correlation Spectroscopy for the Joint Analysis of Correlated Changes in Spectroscopic and Disparate Sources,” published in the May 2021 issue of the journal (Appl. Spectrosc. 75(5), 520-530, 2021), along with their co-authors, H. Georg Schultze, Shreyas Rangan, Martha Vardaki, Timothy Kieffer, Michael Blades, and Diepiriye Iworima. The paper presents an augmented form of two-dimensional correlation spectroscopy that integrates in a single format data from spectroscopic and multiple non-spectroscopic sources for analysis. It demonstrates the approach with data using Raman spectra from human embryonic stem cell aggregates undergoing directed differentiation toward pancreatic endocrine cells.

Turner is a professor at The University of British Columbia with joint appointments in the Michael Smith Laboratories and Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, and an Associate Member of the Department of Chemistry. He earned his PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Alberta in 1990. His current research activities focus on applications of Raman spectroscopy to analytical problems in biochemistry, biotechnology, and biomedical engineering.

Piret is a professor at the University of British Columbia in the Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering and the Michael Smith Laboratories. He received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in Applied Mathematics to Biochemistry, and a chemical engineering doctoral degree from MIT in 1989. His research focus is on innovative process and device technology development for mammalian cell culture therapeutic protein or cell manufacturing.

Turner and Piret discussed this work, and other work being done with their team, in a recent interview in Spectroscopy.