Kenneth S. Suslick Wins 2021 EAS Award for Outstanding Achievements in Analytical Chemistry

Kenneth S. Suslick

The 2021 Eastern Analytical Symposium (EAS) Award for Outstanding Achievements in the Fields of Analytical Chemistry will be presented to Kenneth S. Suslick at the EAS Symposium, taking place November 15–17, 2021, in Plainsboro, New Jersey. The annual EAS awards honor analytical chemists who have distinguished career achievements and who have advanced their fields by superior work in developing theory, techniques, or instrumentation.

Suslick is the Marvin T. Schmidt Research Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He received his BS degree from Caltech in 1974 and his PhD from Stanford in 1978. He began his work at UIUC soon after.

The Suslick Research Group at UIUC is multi-disciplinary, with research projects that involve not only in inorganic, but also in organometallic, bio-organic, bio-organic, materials (both inorganic and biomaterials), surface, analytical, and physical chemistry. The group’s three major research areas are: the chemical effects of ultrasound (including nano-materials synthesis and sonoluminescence), the mechanochemistry of inorganic solids (including shock wave energy dissipation by metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) such as metal-organic framework solids) and chemical sensing (specifically, an “optoelectronic nose,” which is a colorimetric sensor arrays for the detection and quantification of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The "optoelectronic nose” has found applications in the detection of toxic gases and explosives, the discrimination among complex odorants, and rapid diagnosis of disease based on their smell.

Suslick was the George Eastman Professor at the University of Oxford (Oxford, England) from 2018 to 2019. He is the recipient of both the Joel H. Hildebrand and Nobel Laureate Signature Awards of the American Chemical Society, the Centenary Prize and the Sir George Stokes Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Materials Research Society Medal, the Helmholtz-Rayleigh Silver Medal of the Acoustical Society of America, the Chemical Pioneer Award of the American Institute of Chemists, and Sloan and Guggenheim Fellowships; he is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, AAAS, ACS, APS, MRS, RSC, and ASA. He has published more than 420 scientific papers, edited four books, and holds 58 patent applications.