William F. Meggers Award to Be Presented to Tim Johnson at SciX 2019

Timothy Johnson

Timothy J. Johnson, a senior research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), will receive the Society for Applied Spectroscopy (SAS) William F. Meggers Award on Thursday, October 17, at the SciX 2019 conference in Palm Springs, California. Johnson won the award based on his paper “Accurate Measurement of the Optical Constants n and k for a Series of 57 Inorganic and Organic Liquids for Optical Modeling and Detection,” in the journal Applied Spectroscopy. His coauthors were Bruce Bernacki, Jerome Birnbaum, Tyler O. Danby, Tanya Myers, Steven Sharpe, Matt Taubman, and Russell Tonkyn.

Johnson is a physical chemist specializing in spectroscopy in the terahertz, infrared, near-IR and UV-vis domains. He is a cum laude graduate of Carleton College (Northfield, Minnesota), and earnedhis PhD in chemical physics from Washington State University (WSU) (Pullman, Washington), where he studied crystallographic effects on the Raman and infrared spectra of solids. Following his work at WSU, Johnson was a Max Planck postdoctoral fellow in Germany, using diode laser spectroscopy for trace gas detection. Later, he worked in atmospheric trace gas detection using lasers and Fourier transform IR (FT-IR) at York University in Toronto, Canada, and also was an applications scientist at Bruker Optics. At PNNL, Johnson has had experience with spectroscopic signatures, including key contributions to the PNNL gas-phase database. He is the inventor on two U.S. patents, coauthor of one book, and the author of more than 75 refereed publications.

The Applied Spectroscopy William F. Meggers Award is given to the authors of an outstanding paper appearing in Applied Spectroscopy. Nominations for the award are made exclusively by the Meggers Award Committee, and no outside nominations are accepted.

To see Spectroscopy’s interview with Johnson on optical modeling and detection of infrared and other spectra, please click here.