2020 Awardee

The Coblentz Society is pleased to announce that Dr. Christopher Brown of 908 Devices has been selected as the recipient of the 2020 Williams-Wright Award for Industrial Spectroscopy.  The award will be presented at the Pittsburgh Conference, to be held March 1-5, 2020 in Chicago, Illinois USA.  This award is presented to Dr. Brown in recognition of his work in the development of smart, high-performance miniature analytical systems across a range of industries and applications.  The Williams-Wright Award Symposium is held in honor of the awardee and immediately follows the presentation. The 2020 Award symposium will feature an Award Address by Dr. Brown and talks from his invited speakers.                   

Early in his career Chris worked on and led numerous developments of automated spectroscopy-based products for in-vivo biodiagnostics, metabolic monitoring / clinical chemistry, biometrics, and biopharmaceutical process monitoring at InLight Solutions in New Mexico (NIR, mid-IR, fluorescence and spectroscopic imaging). He joined Ahura Scientific in Boston in 2004 to work on the development of the world’s first handheld Raman spectrometer and later handheld FTIR. His time as Sr. Director of Engineering / Product Development at Ahura saw the release of more than a half-dozen products with tailor-made hardware and software for hazmat, military, forensics, and pharmaceutical applications, and has led to over 25,000 handheld Raman/IR systems being usable in the field by non-spectroscopists. After Thermo’s acquisition of Ahura he spent two years at Apple in California as a platform architect for advanced sensing technologies in the phone/wearables sector. He co-founded 908 Devices as Chief Technology Officer in 2012, launching the world’s first self-contained handheld mass spectrometer in 2015 (4 lbs.), and thereafter a range of microscale MS and separation products in the forensics and life-science arena.

Chris and teams have been the fortunate recipients of three R&D 100 awards and a number of other industry technology and product awards. He was selected as a 2017 SAS National Tour Speaker and continues to be very active in the broader analytical community, publishing some 150 papers and conference presentations, and more than 50 patents. He is also a reviewer for numerous journals in analytical chemistry, statistics and machine learning, and is an editorial board member for the Journal of Chemometrics.