Gerald S. Birth Award
Submitted by ianm on 16 July 2012 - 11:17am
The Council for Near Infrared Spectroscopy (CNIRS) is proud to announce that this year’s winner of the Gerald S. Birth Award for best work in diffuse spectroscopy published in 2010—2011 is Dr Michael (Micky) Myrick. Dr Myrick has worked on the development of an instrument for imaging forensic samples in the thermal infrared. The work is detailed in a series of three papers titled “Multimode Imaging in the Thermal Infrared for Chemical Contrast Enhancement”. The three papers were published back-to-back in Analytical Chemistry 82, 8412–8420, 8421–8426 and 8427–8431 (2010). Part 1 described the instrumentation and methodology, Part 2 reported on simulation-driven design and Part 3 described how blood could be visualised on fabrics. The papers were co-authored with Heather Brooke, Megan R. Baranowski, Jessica N. McCutcheon and Stephen L. Morgan. The award, lecture and symposium will be presented at the 16th International Conference on Diffuse Reflectance (IDRC) at Chambersburg, PA, USA, in August 2012. The award includes a trophy and honorarium sponsored by Unity Scientific, Inc.
Michael Myrick received a BS degree in Chemistry at the North Carolina State University and was awarded his PhD in Physical Chemistry at New Mexico State University for his work on energetics and dynamics of metal excited states. He was a postdoctoral associate of S. Michael Angel at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory working on analytical spectroscopy applications. In 1991 he moved to the University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA, where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1997 and Professor of Chemistry in 2003. He has been a visiting scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1995 to the present.
Dr Myrick is the author of more than 160 peer-reviewed or invited publications and invented multivariate optical computing. His patents in this area were licensed to Ometric Corporation, a startup company in Columbia, SC, USA, in 2005. Ometric was sold in early 2011 to Halliburton Energy Services in Houston. He also currently serves as the President of the Coblentz Society for Vibrational Spectroscopy.
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 Corp. in memory of Gerald Birth. The late Dr Birth was the founder of the IDRC, now sponsored by the CNIRS. Dr Birth also made many contributions to instrument technology related to diffuse reflection. It is fitting that the Birth Award this year is conferred upon Dr Michael Myrick, who also has a deep interest in developing and using new techniques for spectroscopic measurements, as an aid to forensic science.
