Emile A. Schweikert Wins Outstanding Achievements in Mass Spectrometry Award

The 2015 Eastern Analytical Symposium and Exposition (EAS) Award for Outstanding Achievements in Mass Spectrometry has been awarded to Emile A. Schweikert, professor of Chemistry at Texas A&M University and Director of the University’s Center for Chemical Characterization & Analysis. The presentation was made during the annual EAS show recently held in Somerset, New Jersey, USA.

Figure 1: Awardee Emilie Schweikert (left) with Oscar Liu (right).

Professor Schweikert was selected for his seminal work in secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), where he concentrates on advancing the fundamentals of the technique and on innovations in instrumentation and methodology. He pioneered the practice of bombarding surfaces with clusters rather than atomic ions and demonstrated SIMS performance enhanced by several orders of magnitude. He has also shown that nanoparticles impacting at hypervelocity generate higher emission of surface ions. One result of this is the ability to observe ion and electron emission from single “nanoprojectile” impacts. Under these conditions the ejecta are from a nanoscopic volume and originate from co-located molecules to enable molecular surface analysis at the nanoscale. This research required nique custom-designed instrumentation to be built to provide insight into massive cluster-solid interactions, leading to numerous applications in surface analysis.    Professor Schweikert’s work has also been recognized with the award of the George Hevesy Medal and the Texas A&M University Excellence in Innovation Award. He has authored or co-authored over 260 papers on surface and ultra-trace analysis. To date he has served as an advisor or mentor to 88 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows.    He is currently involved in the characterization of individual nano-objects and two-dimensional (2D) materials.