Rohit Bhargava Named 2013 Craver Award Recipient

The Coblentz Society has named Rohit Bhargava as the recipient of the 2013 Craver Award. The award will be presented to Bhargava, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in recognition of his work in the area of spectral chemical imaging, including the development of the fundamental theory and modeling of Raman and infrared chemical imaging.

Bhargava’s work has included the application of imaging to the study of polymeric systems and biological systems. He has researched instrumentation development and analysis, including the development of high definition and ultrasensitive IR imaging systems and of time-resolved IR imaging. He has also made advances in the design and fabrication of nanostructures for optical sensing, chemometrics, high-performance computing, and visualization.

In addition to being a Bliss Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois, Bhargava is also a faculty member in chemical and biomolecular engineering, mechanical science and engineering, and electrical and computer engineering at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

Bhargava received dual degrees in chemical engineering, and polymer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (New Delhi, India). His doctoral thesis work at Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, Ohio) was in polymer spectroscopy. He also has worked as a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, Maryland) in biomedical vibrational spectroscopy.

Research in the Bhargava laboratories focuses on fundamental optical theory for vibrational spectroscopic imaging, developing new instrumentation, application of spectroscopic imaging to biomedical and polymer problems, and numerical analyses.

Bhargava’s work has been recognized with several research and teaching awards, and he is routinely nominated to the list of teachers ranked as excellent at Illinois. He is also the 2012 winner of the FACSS Innovation Award for novel work presented for the first time at the SciX conference. His work has also been recognized with the William F. Meggers Award from the Society of Applied Spectroscopy (1999 and 2002).

The Craver Award was created in 2006 by the Coblentz Society as a way to recognize the efforts of young professional spectroscopists that have made significant contributions in applied analytical vibrational spectroscopy. The Society named the award for Clara D. Craver in recognition of her pioneering efforts in promoting the practice of infrared vibrational spectroscopy and her many years of service to the Coblentz Society.

The Craver Award will be presented at the 2013 SciX Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, September 29-October 3. Bhargava will present the Coblentz Society’s Craver Award Plenary Lecture in Applied Vibrational Spectroscopy. A half-day award symposium of five invited presentations will be held following his lecture at the conference.

Spectroscopy will publish a podcast interview with Bhargava on February 20 as part of a series honoring recipients of awards presented at the 2013 SciX Conference. Interviews from the 2012 series can be found at www.spectroscopyonline.com/podcasts