Skip to content ↓

Awards and honors

Students, postdoctoral associates and friends have endowed a new award in honor of Professor Klaus Biemann of the Department of Chemistry, who recently accepted MIT's early-retirement offer. The Biemann Medal and a cash award will be presented annually to an individual early in his or her career who has made a significant achievement in basic or applied mass spectrometry.

The medal honors Professor Biemann, whose "lasting legacy is the training of students and postdoctoral associates over a 40-year period at MIT." Said Dr. Ronald A. Hites, who received the PhD with Professor Biemann and was on the MIT faculty from 1972-79: "I'm always telling my graduate students things that Klaus told me. From him, we learned how to organize our thinking, and we learned how to give a scientific talk that was also an interesting story. He tells a fine story, and we all learned that one way or another." Dr. Hites is now a professor at Indiana University.

The first award (which has been funded from contributions by many of Professor Biemann's approximately 250 former doctoral students and postdocs) will be given at the 1997 meeting of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry.
----------

Professor Daniel Kemp of the Department of Chemistry has been chosen as a recipient of the 1997 Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society. The Cope Scholar Awards program was established in 1984 to recognize and encourage excellence in organic chemistry. Professor Kemp will deliver a lecture at the Arthur C. Cope Symposium, organized by the ACS Division of Organic Chemistry, next September in Las Vegas.
----------

The Alpha Theta chapter of Sigma Chi at MIT was presented with the Peterson Significant Chapter Award at the fraternity's 49th annual leadership training workshop in August in Bowling Green, OH. Award criteria include scholarship, pledge and member retention, financial stability, campus activities and leadership, campus and community service, faculty and alumni relations, publications, initiation and pledge programs.

The Sigma Chi Foundation sponsors the award (the highest bestowed on an undergraduate chapter) and presents winning chapters with a cash contribution for its university's counseling or tutoring program. There are 229 undergraduate chapters in North America; 44 received the 1995-96 award.

A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on October 30, 1996.

Related Topics

More MIT News