JAAS News

The DASp – German Working group for Applied Spectroscopy – regularly awards the “Bunsen-Kirchhoff-Preis für analytische Spektroskopie” to honour preferably the work of young scientists from universities, research institutes or industry who made excellent contributions to analytical spectroscopy. Especially preferred is an oeuvre in new areas like spectroscopy in nano compartments, and spectroscopy of biomolecules. The Award consists of an award-document and an amount of € 2.500,00 sponsored by Perkin Elmer GmbH and the DASp seeks nominations for the 2012 Bunsen-Kirchhoff Award for Analytical Spectroscopy. The Award will be presented at the Analytica Conference in April 2012 in Munich (Germany).

A nomination should include:

1. letter with the candidate´s accomplishments
2. list of publications or recent work,
3. scientific curriculum vitae stating the age of the candidate; the candidate´s address, phone fax and e-mail.

Nominations can be made by members of DASp but eligibility is open for any scientist meeting the requirements. Self-nomination is excluded. The decision as to whom the prize is to be awarded shall be made by a jury consisting of the current members of the board of DASp.

Further information is available here.

All documents should be sent no later than 31 December 2011 to:
Prof. Dr. Detlef Günther, President of the Jury for the Bunsen-Kirchhoff Award 2012, Laboratorium für Anorganische Chemie, ETH Hönggerberg, HCI, CH-8093 Zürich (Schweiz)

The work of a number of researchers affiliated with JAAS has been prominently featured in the popular press recently.  The paper:

“First health and pollution study on harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) living in the German Elbe estuary“, Antje Kakuschke, Elizabeth Valentine-Thon, Simone Griesel, Juergen Gandrass, Octavio Perez Luzardo, Luis Dominguez Boada, Manuel Zumbado Peña, Maira Almeida González, Mechthild Grebe, Daniel Pröfrock, Hans-Burkhard Erbsloeh, Katharina Kramer, Sonja Fonfara and Andreas Prange., Marine Pollution Bulletin,60(11), 2019-2086.

was cited on a number of popular news sites because of the concerns it raised about the pollution of coastal environments.  Specifically, the authors found elevated levels of many heavy metals and long-lived industrial pollutants in the blood of the seals, and hypothesized that similar pollution effects were responsible for the elevated immune response observed in these animals. They suggested that periodic monitoring of these subjects will provide new insights into the adverse effects of marine activity on their local ecosystem, making them- in effect- very cute biomarkers.  Kudos to the authors on this wonderful work…

(Carsten Engelhard)  Dr. Daniel Pröfrock has been named the 2011 Bunsen-Kirchhoff Award winner.

Prof. Detlef Günther, JAAS Editorial Board Chair and member of the award committee, presented the prize on behalf of the German Society for Applied Spectrocopy (DASp) during the ANAKON conference dinner. The ANAKON conference was held March 22 – 25, 2011 in Zurich, Switzerland. Every year the Bunsen-Kirchhoff Award is given to an outstanding young scientist in the field of spectroscopy. The prize includes a monetary reward of 2.500,00 €.

Daniel presented an award lecture entitled “Elemental speciation in environmental and life sciences utilizing heteroatoms, miniaturization, and mass spectrometry”.  He is a scientist in the Marine Bioanalytical Chemistry Department of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht Centre for Materials and Coastal Research (HZG, http://www.hzg.de).  His research interests include trace element analysis and elemental speciation in the marine environment, as well as development and application of hyphenated techniques for marine bio analysis.

Congratulations Daniel!