CASSS Awardees Document Their Careers to Preserve History

The list of winners of the prestigious CASSS Award for Outstanding Achievements in Separation Science reads like a who’s who of the field. But beyond the award, the details of the winners’ contributions to separation science are being lost to time.

No information about the early recipients can be unearthed, and only a short career summary for the seven newest winners has been available on the CASSS website. As time passes, the lives and stories of these winners would likely have been forgotten; and no one would know how they grew up, what they studied, what their motivation was, and what they did and why.

CASSS will now be preserving that history with its new Biography Project. Thanks to the initiative of Lloyd Snyder, one of the early award winners, CASSS is in the process of providing more complete autobiographies of as many past winners as possible and plans to continue those efforts to include future awardees.

The first three of these autobiographies is now available on the CASSS website.

Ever since its beginning, CASSS has always been involved in the field of chemical separations. This interest is demonstrated with a number of conferences focusing on chromatography in a variety of its incarnations such as LC, GC, CE, and CEC and their applications in areas such as omics, environment, food safety, pharmaceuticals, and biologics.

To further support the field, CASSS introduced in 1995 the CASSS Award for Outstanding Achievements in Separation Science. The award winner is selected every year by nominations and a vote of CASSS Associate Directors.

The following 22 scientists have received this award during the past 20 years:

More on the CASSS Biography Project.