David E. Clemmer, Distinguished Professor and Robert and Marjorie Mann Chair in Chemistry, is the recipient of the 2023 Frank H. Field and Joe L. Franklin Award for Outstanding Achievement in Mass Spectrometry from the American Chemical Society. This award recognizes “outstanding achievement in the development or application of mass spectrometry.” Professor Clemmer, along with his students and other colleagues pioneered “ion mobility mass spectrometry” which is now used widely around the world in the analysis of complex mixtures and assessment of biomolecular structure. He will receive this award during the Spring 2023 National ACS meeting in Indianapolis.
Professor Clemmer received a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Utah where he worked with Peter Armentrout. He carried out postdoctoral work at the Himeji Institute of Technology with Kenji Honma (Japan) and at Northwestern University where he worked with Martin Jarrold. In 1995 he joined Indiana University as a member of the Chemistry faculty. Professor Clemmer and his collaborators have published more than 300 papers and more than 45 patents. This work has been recognized with several awards, including the 2018 John B. Fenn Distinguished Contribution Award (which he shared with Martin Jarrold and Gert von Heldon), the 2006 Biemann Medal, the 2014 Ron Hites Award, and 1997 Finnegan Award, all from the American Society for Mass Spectrometry; the Findeis (2000), Eli Lilly Analytical (2002), Akron Section (2007), and Chemical Instrumentation (2012) awards, from the ACS; as well as the Phi Lamba Upsilon National Fresenius Chemistry Award (2000), Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (1999), and an Alfred P. Sloan Research fellowship (1998). Prof. Clemmer is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. He served as Chair of the Department of Chemistry (2002-2006) and Associate Dean of Natural and Mathematical Sciences for the College of Arts and Sciences (2012-2015). He was a scientific co-founder of Beyond Genomics (BG-Medicine), a Boston-based systems biology company, and a co-founder (with Martin Jarrold and Ben Draper) of Megadalton Solutions, a Bloomington-based gene-therapy characterization biotech startup.