Frank H. Field & Joe L. Franklin Award for Outstanding Achievement in Mass Spectrometry: Vicki H. Wysocki

Sponsor: Waters Corp.

Citation: For her outstanding accomplishments in the development of surface-induced dissociation for native mass spectrometry structural characterization of noncovalent complexes.

Current position: professor of chemistry and biochemistry, Ohio Eminent Scholar, Ohio State University

Education: B.S., chemistry, Western Kentucky University; Ph.D., chemistry, Purdue University

Wysocki on her scientific role model and why: “Nobel Prize winner John Fenn moved to my department when I was an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and showed that you can set up a lab and do strong science without a huge group or a huge budget; he remained humble and attended our joint analytical chemistry group meetings and insisted he was just one of the students. Carol Robinson of Oxford is also a great role model. She worked in industry first and took eight years off to have children and has become one of the top scientists in the world today. Some people may see this as a single outlier datapoint, but I think it is simply an illustration that our ideas of what ‘works’ in a career are often false.”

What her colleagues say: “Her more recent research in the area of mass spectrometry of large protein complexes, which builds upon her fundamental studies of surface-induced dissociation, has provided structural biology research groups around the world with new approaches for macromolecule characterization. Fundamental studies of surface-induced dissociation (SID), which has been a focus of her research for the past 20-plus years, has led to the development of novel approaches for interrogation of macromolecule complexes, including the conformations of the protein complexes and subunits as well as stoichiometry of the subunits.”—Facundo Fernandez, Georgia Institute of Technology