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.

Nominate someone for the 2024 award. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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