News
Colón receives Schoellkopf Award
Luis A. Colón, professor and immediate past chair of the Department of Chemistry, College of Arts and Sciences, has been selected to be the recipient of the 2012 Jacob F. Schoellkopf Award.
The award, given annually by the Western New York section of the American Chemical Society (ACS), honors an individual from the Niagara Frontier for outstanding work and service in the fields of chemistry or chemical engineering. The society has been presenting the award every year since 1931, making it the oldest award of its kind in the nation. UB scientists also won the award in 1996, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007, 2009 and 2010.
In selecting Colón to receive the Schoellkopf Medal, the award selection committee cited “his pioneering contributions to the advancement of separation science, his dedication to mentoring and advancing of diversity in the chemical sciences, and his service and leadership in the profession.”
A UB faculty member since 1993, Colón is an analytical chemist whose research focuses on chemical analysis at the micro/nano scales, the development of new materials for chemical separations, environmental chemistry and bioanalytical chemistry, especially developing new methodology to analyze biological samples, such as saliva and tears, and their potential use in clinical diagnostics.
He has authored or co-authored some 100 publications, holds eight U.S. patents and with his team has delivered more than 400 presentations related to his research.
Colón has served, or is serving, on the editorial/advisory boards of Analyst, Applied Spectroscopy Reviews, Electrophoresis and Microchemical Journal, and also was editor of The Analyst, an international Journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry, from 2001-07.
He also has served as chair of the Western New York section of the ACS, as a member of the governing board of the Northeast Regional Chromatography Discussion Group and as a member of the executive committee of the ACS Subdivision of Chromatography and Separation Chemistry.
Colón has long been involved in advancing diversity and mentoring students in the chemical sciences. For many years, he has arranged for Hispanic undergraduates from his native Puerto Rico to have a summer research experience in the Department of Chemistry. Many of these students have gone on to pursue graduate study.
Colón is a member of the advisory committee to the Arthur A. Schomburg Fellowship Program, which supports underrepresented students in graduate programs at UB; he also serves as a research mentor for Schomburg Fellows. He has worked with the National Science Foundation-SUNY Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation and the SUNY Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate, which aims to produce more PhDs among underrepresented groups.
Colón has received numerous awards in recognition of his mentoring, among them the 2009 AAAS Mentor Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Faculty Mentor of the Year Award in 2004 from the Compact for Faculty Diversity, a national initiative to produce more minority PhDs. He is one of two inaugural recipients of the Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring Award administered by the UB Graduate School, and earlier this year was named the recipient of the Geoffrey Marshall Mentoring Award from the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools.
Reader Comments