SAS and Applied Spectroscopy William F. Meggers Award Presentation, Plenary Lecture, and Symposium

On the final full day of the SciX (The Great Scientific Exchange) 2023 conference in Sparks, Nevada, USA, this year’s SAS (Society for Applied Spectroscopy) and Applied Spectroscopy William F. Meggers Award will be presented to Johannes Pedarnig, an associate professor in the Institute of Applied Physics at Johannes Kepler University Linz, in Linz, Austria.

Pedarnig will be honored with a symposium during an afternoon session at the conference, which is presented by the Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Societies (FACSS), on Thursday, October 12. Preceding that symposium, Pedarnig himself will give a plenary lecture at 11:00 a.m. local time on the 12th, entitled “LIBS and LA-SD-OES: Laser Ablation and Electric Sparks for Chemical Element Analysis.”

In that talk, Pedarnig will address differences in how the concentrations of side elements in industrial materials, specifically steel samples, are determined both by laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) and laser ablation-spark discharge-optical emission spectroscopy (LA-SD-OES), namely that LA-SD-OES enables element analysis largely independent of composition, and LIBS must account for the matrix effect.

The symposium honoring Pedarnig will commence at 1:30 p.m. and will feature four speakers. First up will be Igor Gornushkin, a senior scientist at the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM) in Berlin, Germany, presenting “Investigation of LIBS-RF Plasma for Analytical Spectroscopy.” Next at 1:50, Vassilia Zorba, the group leader of the Laser Technologies Group in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, will speak on “Remote Detection of Li Isotopes.” Following that at 2:10, Alessandro de Giacomo, a professor at the University of Bari Aldo Moro in Bari, Italy, will present “On the Significance of Laser Ablation Efficiency for LIBS Signal Enhancement.” And finally at 2:30, Jose Miguel Vadillo, a full professor at the University of Màlaga in Spain, will give a talk entitled “LIBS and LIMS in the Context of Planetary/Space Research.”

The SAS and Applied Spectroscopy William F. Meggers Award has been conferred since 1960 to the author or authors of the preceding year’s outstanding article in Applied Spectroscopy. A $3500 honorarium is split, in cases of multiple authors, equally among all contributors. Meggers (1888–1966), after whom the award is named, is widely considered “the dean of American spectroscopists.”

The Thursday SciX sessions will conclude with the FACSS Innovation Award Finalists plenary session at 3:50 p.m.—the winner of that award will be announced Friday morning—followed by the SciX Gala, which is open to all attendees, on Thursday evening.

For the entire SciX 2023 schedule, including room locations and abstracts, go to https://scixconference.org/scix2023program/.