Presentation of spectrochemical award to Professor Fassel

VELMER A. FASSEL,Professor Emeritus at Iowa State University, and former principal scientist at the Ames Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy, received the 1988 ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry Award in S~trochemieal Analysis. The award is sponsored by the Perkin-Elmer Corporation to foster innovation in spectrochemical analysis. It honors individuals who have advanced the field of spectrachemical analysis and optical spectrometry. The award was established in 1986, and consists of $4000 and a plaque that was presented at the ACS fall meeting held in Los Angeles, 25-30 September 1988. A winner since he was a schoolboy when he won a chemistry contest with its $200 prize enabling his enrollment in college, Fassel has collected numerous national and intemational honors and awards. Outstanding among them are: 1964 medal of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy; 1969 Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh Award; 1971 Hasler and Anachem Awards; 1979 Fisher ACS Award in Analytical Chemistry; 1983 ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry Award in Chemical Inst~mentation, and AOAC Harvey W. Wiley Award; 1986 Lester W. Strock Award shared with co-authors of the pioneering paper, and IR-100 Award shared with the co-inventors of “one of: the 100 most significant technical products of 1986”. The author of more than 200 publications, FasSel has been honored by three feature articles in Analytical Chemistry; he served for 13 years as American editor for Spectrochimica Acta and, in 1985, that journ& dedicated a special issue in his honor. Fassel was Ames Laboratory deputy SAlsf41:3-1 237

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Presentation to Professor Fassel

director for 14 years. The ICP-AMES (Inductively Coupled Plasma-Atomic Multielement Emission Spectroscope) instrument developed by Fassel and colleagues in Ames is manufactured in several countries, and is today an indispensable part of every analytical laboratory. He has been very influential in developing the new analytical technique of ICP-mass spectrometry. Fassel received the award and presented an address at the symposium organized in his honor by EDWARDYEUNG, current program director of Environmental Sciences at the Ames Laboratory. Fassel was the program’s founding director. Iowa State University operates the Ames Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy.