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Analytical Chemistry

Frank H. Field & Joe L. Franklin Award For Outstanding Achievement In Mass Spectroscopy

Recipients are honored for contributions of major significance to chemistry

by Lisa M. Jarvis
January 19, 2009 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 87, Issue 3

Armentrout
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Credit: Courtesy of Peter Armentrout
Credit: Courtesy of Peter Armentrout

Sponsored by Waters Corp.

Anyone who has been to Salt Lake City in the summer knows it takes some grit to go outside each day and take a walk, let alone run at high noon. It's perhaps not surprising that the person with the tenacity to choose heat and hilly climbs over air conditioning and a sandwich would also see a major gap in the chemistry literature and have the resolve to go out and fill it himself.

Peter B. Armentrout, avid runner and distinguished chemistry professor at the University of Utah, is a pioneer in using guided ion-beam mass spectrometry to provide high-quality bond association data for otherwise unwieldy systems. He has methodically collected and analyzed an impressive volume of data for transition metals, metal-ligand complexes, and metal clusters.

As an undergraduate at Case Western Reserve University and then as a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, Armentrout, 55, was interested in bringing a degree of reliability to thermodynamic information. He was frustrated that many physical chemists failed to consider the origin of the data they were using to make calculations and believed everything could simply be looked up in a book. The goal was to enable chemists "to think intelligently about putting together unusual molecules," he says.

That directly led to the construction of the guided ion-beam tandem mass spectrometer. "I like to think I've brought respectability back to thermodynamics as state-of-the-art chemistry," Armentrout says.

Armentrout has made significant contributions to the field, says Jesse L. Beauchamp, chemistry professor at Caltech. Not only did Armentrout design and build an instrument that could impart a high degree of accuracy in thermodynamic measurements, but he also developed the tools to analyze those measurements, most importantly the computer program Crunch, and made them available for other scientists. Further, Beauchamp points out, the wide array of ion sources used in Armentrout's experiments has generated data that are critical to many different industries, with relevance to semiconductors as well as biomedical and environmental systems.

"Rather than being content to simply compile this imposing list of new thermodynamic information, Armentrout has distinguished himself by analyzing and elucidating the trends in this information, thereby making it much more useful to others," Beauchamp adds.

Considering that level of accessibility, along with the many industries the measurements can be applied to, it is no surprise that Armentrout is one of the more often-cited chemists. Those achievements have also led to a number of awards and honors, including most recently the Case Western chemistry department's Outstanding Alumnus of the Year, the ACS's Utah Award of Chemistry, and induction into the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society.

Today, Armentrout has wrapped up much of the thermodynamic information on transition metals, but he continues to collect data on metal clusters. In recent years, he has expanded the scope of his research into the thermodynamics of biological systems.

As for the running habit, Armentrout has expanded there, too: He's finished six marathons in the past eight years and recently has gotten into participating in a 12-person, 172-mile relay that takes place over the course of 24 hours.

Armentrout will present the award address before the Division of Physical Chemistry.

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