Prof. Facundo Fernandez wins prestigious research award from the American Society for Mass Spectrometry and Prof. Marcus Weck wins Sloan Foundation Fellowship.

The American Society for Mass Spectrometry annually presents three research awards in the amount of $25,000 each. The purpose of the awards is to promote academic research by young scientists in mass spectrometry. They are fully sponsored by Applied Biosystems/MSD Sciex, ThermoElectron Corp., and Waters Corp. The Research Awards were originated by Robert Finnigan in 1986.

The presentation will be at the ASMS conference, June 5-9, 2005 in San Antonio.

Professor Marcus Weck receives the Sloan Foundation Fellowship. He will use the award to support his work in developing self-assembling, multifunctional raw materials. Weck explained that nature uses only a few building blocks to make a wide array of complex materials, such as DNA and proteins. His work involves trying to mimic nature's design motifs in making new materials. Each fellow at Tech will receive $45,000 over a two-year period that can be used without restriction in research of the fellow's choice. The awards, established in 1955, are the oldest program of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and are designed to give support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars.

Professor Weck also has received the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award. In 1969 the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation established the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Awards Program to support the teaching and research careers of talented young faculty in the chemical sciences. Based on institutional nominations, the program was designed to provide discretionary funding to faculty at early stages in their careers. Criteria for selection included an independent body of scholarship and a commitment to education that signaled the promise of continuing outstanding contributions to both research and teaching.