Prof. Rabolt wins prestigious spectroscopy award

John Rabolt

3 p.m., March 18, 2005--John Rabolt, the Karl W. and Renate Böer Professor and chairperson of the University of Delaware’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, has received the prestigious Pittsburgh Spectroscopy Award from the Spectroscopic Society of Pittsburgh.

The award was given in recognition of Rabolt’s lifelong contributions to the development of novel spectroscopic techniques and their application to the study of structure and morphology in thin organic and polymeric films. It was presented March 1 during a special symposium arranged in his honor at the 56th annual Pittsburgh Conference and Exposition on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy in Orlando, Fla.

Rabolt has pioneered the application of focal plane arrays to infrared spectroscopy, bringing about portable instruments that are capable of recording an infrared spectrum in less than 100 microseconds, with a microsecond being one millionth of one second. This has allowed the study of dynamics in organic and polymeric materials and provided, for the first time, insights into how molecules orient and order as they assemble on surfaces.

Rabolt also holds a position as an associated faculty member at the Delaware Biotechnology Institute, where he maintains a laboratory with several graduate students working on tissue engineering scaffolds.

Before joining UD in 1996 as chairperson of the College of Engineering’s Materials Science Program, which became the Department of Materials Science and Engineering under his stewardship, Rabolt was a research staff member in the IBM Research Division in San Jose, Calif. There, he was a founding co-director of the Center on Polymer Interfaces and Macromolecular Assemblies, a National Science Foundation-sponsored partnership among Stanford University, IBM, the University of California Davis and the University of California Berkeley.

Rabolt’s research interests are in the area of polymer deformation and orientation, electrospun polymer nanofibers, organic thin films on surfaces, infrared and Raman spectroscopy, and biomolecular materials.

Members of Rabolt’s research group joining him at the conference are (from left) Chris Snively, research associate in materials science and engineering and chemical engineering, Christian Pellerin, now a professor of chemistry at the University of Montreal, Rabolt, Steve Givens, second-year graduate student in materials science and engineering, and Julia Liu, fourth-year graduate student in materials science and engineering.

He received the 2000 A.E. Michelson Award in Molecular Spectroscopy sponsored by the Bomem analytical products company, the 1993 Ellis Lippincott Award in Vibrational Spectroscopy, the 1992 Louis A. Strait Award in Applied Spectroscopy, the 1990 Williams-Wright Award in Molecular Spectroscopy and the 1985 Coblentz Award.

In addition to serving as chairperson of three Gordon Research Conferences--on organic thin films in 1996 and on polymers and on vibrational spectroscopy in 1990--Rabolt is an American Physical Society Fellow and was an associate editor of the American Chemical Society journal Macromolecules from 1992-2001.

He served as a member of the Gordon Research Conference’s Scheduling and Selection Committee from 1997-2003 and is currently a member of NASA’s Microgravity Materials Science Advisory Committee.

Rabolt has co-authored more than 180 peer-reviewed publications, one book and eight patents.

Previous recipients of the Pittsburgh Spectroscopy Award have included Gerhard Herzberg (1962), Paul Lauterbur (1987) and Ahmed Zewail (1997), who later went on to become Nobel Laureates.

Article by Neil Thomas

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