The Lippincott Award
About the Award
The Ellis R. Lippincott Award is presented annually to an outstanding vibrational spectroscopist. It is co-sponsored by the Coblentz Society, the Society for Applied Spectroscopy, and Optica (formerly OSA). The award is presented in memory of Professor Ellis R. Lippincott to scientists who have made significant contributions to vibrational spectroscopy as judged by their influence on other scientists.

2023 Lippincott Award Recipient – Peter R. Griffiths

The 2023 Ellis R. Lippincott Award will be presented to Peter Griffiths, Professor and Chair Emeritus, Department of Chemistry, University of Idaho, USA. He is recognized for unique achievements and significant contributions to vibrational spectroscopy.
Peter Griffiths was born in England and spent the first 25 years of his life there. He received his doctorate in Physical Chemistry from Oxford University, UK, and spent two years doing postdoctoral research at the University of Maryland, USA, under the supervision of Ellis Lippincott. After brief stints with Digilab, USA, and Sadtler Research Labs, USA, he joined the faculty of Ohio University, USA, reaching the rank of Distinguished Professor. He moved to the University of California, Riverside, USA, before accepting the chairmanship of the Chemistry Department of the University of Idaho, USA, from which he retired in 2008.
His principal research area has been analytical vibrational spectroscopy with particular emphasis on FT-IR spectroscopy. Among the topics that his research group has worked on are diffuse reflection spectroscopy, open-path atmospheric monitoring, and the interface of FT-IR spectrometers with various types of chromatographs (GC, HPLC and SFC).
He has co-authored over 300 papers and has written, co-authored, or edited eleven books on these topics. He taught in a week-long course on the interpretation of IR and Raman spectra for over 30 years and acted as a consultant to several companies and organizations.
The award will be presented at SciX 2023 in Sparks, Nevada.
Recent Lippincott Award Recipients
2022 Lippincott Award Recipient
The 2022 Ellis R. Lippincott Award will be presented to Martin Zanni, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA “for innovative contributions to the technology and application of two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy.”
Martin T. Zanni received his PhD from the University of California-Berkeley, USA, and was a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He is currently the Meloche-Bascom Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Zanni is one of the early pioneers of 2D IR spectroscopy and has made many technological innovations that have broadened the capabilities and scope for a wide range of multidimensional spectroscopies and microscopies. He utilizes these new techniques to study topics in biophysics, chemical physics, photovoltaics, and surfaces. He founded PhaseTech Spectroscopy Inc., which is the first company to commercialize 2D IR and 2D Electronic spectroscopies.
He has received many national and international accolades for his research. Notably, he is the only person to have received the American Chemical Society Nobel Laureate Signature Award as both a student and a mentor and the first person to receive both the Craver and the Coblentz awards. He is a Fellow of Optica and the American Physical Society.

2021 Lippincott Award Recipient
The 2021 Ellis R. Lippincott Award will be presented to Rohit Bhargava for “contributions to the fundamental physics and instrument engineering of mid-IR microscopy and its applications to medical imaging.” Presentation of the 2021 award is planned for SciX in Providence, Rhode Island.
Rohit Bhargava is Founder Professor in Engineering and serves as the Director of the Cancer Center at Illinois of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Rohit graduated with a dual-degree B.Tech. (1996) from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi and received a doctoral degree from Case Western Reserve University (2000). After a stint at the National Institutes of Health, he has been at Illinois as Assistant (2005-2011), Associate (2011-2012) and Full (2012-) Professor. Rohit has contributed to infrared chemical imaging with advances in theory, development of new instrumentation, and applications, especially in cancer pathology. He is recognized for his teaching and mentoring as well, including directing the NIH T32-supported Tissue Microenvironment training program. Rohit has also served to connect the research community in new and exciting ways. He proposed and has served to develop the Cancer Center at Illinois – a basic science center at the convergence of engineering and oncology.

2020 Lippincott Award Recipient
The 2020 Ellis R. Lippincott Award will be presented to Dr. Volker Deckert, “for ongoing contributions to high-resolution Raman spectroscopy, in particular the realization of tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, allowing label-free structural surface characterization down to the single-molecule level.” Presentation of the 2020 award is planned at SciX, 11 – 16 October 2020, in Sparks, Nevada.
Dr. Volker Deckert is a Professor for Physical Chemistry at the Friedrich-Schiller University and jointly a department head at the Leibniz IPHT, both in Jena. He obtained his Diploma and his Ph.D. from the University of Würzburg, working on Raman spectroscopy. After a postdoc at the University of Tokyo, he started his research on near-field optical spectroscopy, first at the ETH Zurich, then in Dresden and Dortmund before he finally came to Jena.

2019 Lippincott Award Recipient
Ji-Xin Cheng attended University of Science and Technology of China from 1989 to 1994 and pursued a PhD study on bond-selective chemistry from 1994 to 1998. In 2000, he joined Sunney Xie’s group at Harvard University as a postdoc. Cheng joined Purdue University in 2003 as Assistant Professor, promoted to Associate Professor in 2009 and Full Professor in 2013. He joined Boston University as the Inaugural Moustakas Chair Professor in Photonics and Optoelectronics in 2017.
Ji-Xin Cheng devoted his career to transforming molecular spectroscopy from an in vitro analytical tool to a set of in vivo label-free chemical imaging platforms for discovery of hidden signatures inside living systems and further translation of the discoveries into medical diagnosis and treatment strategies.

2018 Lippincott Award Recipient
The 2018 Ellis R. Lippincott Award will be presented to Peter Hamm, Universitat Zurich, “for seminal contributions to developing multidimensional infrared, Raman and Terahertz spectroscopy and pioneering studies of protein and hydrogen bonding dynamics in molecular liquids.”
Peter Hamm studied physics at the Technical University of Munich and carried out his PhD studies under Wolfgang Zinth at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich between 1991 and 1995. He continued with a postdoc at University of Pennsylvania in the group of Robin Hochstrasser. In 1999, he was appointed as an independent group leader at the Max Born Institute, Berlin, and in 2001 as professor at University of Zürich, where he stayed ever since.
Hamm’s research is focused on establishing novel spectroscopic methods in the infrared and THz spectral range which resolve transient structures of molecular systems and the energy flow through them on very fast timescales. A large variety of questions is addressed, ranging from complex problems such as protein folding and allosteric communication in proteins, over photocatalytic water splitting, to elementary structural processes in liquids like water.

2017 Lippincott Award Recipient
Roberto Merlin is the Peter A. Franken Professor of Physics and a Professor in the EECS Department at the University of Michigan. He received the Licenciado en Ciencias Fisicas and the Dr. rer. nat. degrees from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina (1973) and the University of Stuttgart, Germany (1978).
Merlin is the recipient of 2006 APS Isakson Prize, a Fellow of AAAS, OSA, APS, and the von Humboldt, Guggenheim and Simons Foundation. Professor Merlin’s primary research specialty is experimental condensed matter physics. His areas of expertise include various continuous wave and ultrafast optical techniques and, in particular, spontaneous and impulsive (stimulated) Raman spectroscopy. His current interests focus on the generation of coherent vibrational and electronic fields using ultrafast laser and x-ray pulses and metamaterials.
Merlin and collaborators pioneered work on folded acoustic and interface phonons in semiconductor heterostructures, and on Fibonacci superlattices, metasurfaces and squeezed phonons.

1976-2016 Lippincott Award Recipients
The respective host societies are listed below each recipient’s name.
2016
Thomas Elsaesser
SAS
2015
Dana D. Dlott
OSA
2014
Andrei Tokmakoff
Coblentz
2013
X. Sunney Xie
SAS
2012
Keith A. Nelson
OSA
2011
Isao Noda
Coblentz
2010
Martin Moskovits
SAS
2009
Michael Fayer
OSA
2008
Richard Van Duyne
Coblentz
2007
Jonathan Tennyson
SAS
2006
Hai Lung Dai
OSA
2005
Jaan Laane
Coblentz
2004
Richard Mathies
SAS
2003
Shaul Mukamel
OSA
2002
Sanford Asher
Coblentz
2001
Lester Andrews
SAS
2000
Donald Levy
OSA
1999
Mitsuo Tasumi
Coblentz
1998
Takeshi Oka
SAS
1997
Robin Hochstrasser
OSA
1996
Giuseppe Zerbi
Coblentz
1995
Giacinto Scoles
SAS
1994
Herbert L. Strauss
OSA
1993
John Rabolt
Coblentz
1992
Richard J. Saykally
SAS
1990
Robert W. Field
OSA
1989
Marilyn E. Jacox
Coblentz
1988
Andreas C. Albrecht
SAS
1987
C. Bradley Moore
OSA
1986
Wolfgang Kaiser
Coblentz
1985
Ira W. Levin
SAS
1984
Jon T. Hougen
OSA
1983
John Overend
Coblentz
1982
Michel Delhaye
SAS
1981
Ian Mills
OSA
1980
George G. Pimentel
Coblentz
1979
E. Bright Wilson
SAS
1978
Bryce Crawford, Jr.
OSA
1977
Lionel Bellamy
Coblentz
1976
Richard G. Lord
SAS