Distinguished Service Award
Distinguished Service Award: This award is established to recognize individual members for their long-time service to the Society. Nominations for the Distinguished Service Award may be made by Regional, Technical, or Student sections, individual members, the Awards Committee or the Executive Committee. Nomination material should include a letter of recommendation with supporting documentation regarding the nominee's contributions to the Society and spectroscopy, a current CV, and a short bio.
2025 Award Winner
 Dr. Richard Crocombe, Ph.D.
Richard Crocombe is the Principal at Crocombe Spectroscopic Consulting. Prior to this he worked at a number of companies on the development of new spectrometers and their applications, and worked extensively with portable spectrometers, including Raman, mid-infrared, near-infrared, XRF and GC/MS.
For the Society for Applied Spectroscopy (SAS), he is a former chair of the New England section, former elected Governing Board member, and former President (2020) of the national Society. He led the effort to establish SAS’s second scientific journal (Applied Spectroscopy Practica), launched in 2023, and he was its founding Editor-in-Chief, before stepping down to the Editor position for 2025. Also for SAS, he was active in organizing and participating in webinars produced by SAS’s media partners, including Spectroscopy magazine, Photonics Spectra and John Wiley.
He is a former board member and secretary of The Coblentz Society, and for ten years was chair of the SPIE conference ‘Next-Generation Spectroscopic Technologies’.
He has published extensively on miniature and portable spectrometers, including a comprehensive review article in Applied Spectroscopy in 2018, downloaded over 32,000 times. Richard Crocombe, Pauline Leary and Brooke Kammrath are the joint editors of the two-volume book, ‘Portable Spectroscopy and Spectrometry’, published by John Wiley in April 2021.
2024 Award Winner
Jay Kitt
Jay P. Kitt, is Research Assistant Professor at the University of Utah in the Department of Chemistry. The Society for Applied Spectroscopy is honoring Jay with its Distinguished Service Award for his generous service to the Society for Applied Spectroscopy and to the broader scientific community. As Parliamentarian for the Society, Jay completely re-wrote the SAS Bylaws and thereby modernized the Society’s procedures and operations. Dr. Kitt acquired training in Parliamentary Procedure and worked with procedural and legal experts. He spent untold hours replacing the original SAS Constitution and Bylaws with a single legal Bylaws document, consistent with current best practices for non-profit organizations. For someone at the beginning of his independent scientific career to undertake this level of volunteer effort on behalf of the Society is truly inspiring. Jay continued to serve as the Society’s Parliamentarian, demonstrating to the Society leadership how to function within the new Bylaws. The clarity his guidance has allowed meetings of the Executive Committee and the Governing Board to move forward with fewer misunderstandings and quality discourse. This effort has enabled progress on a number of key Society initiatives, including the start-up of a second Journal.
Jay Kitt is remains an accomplished member of the Society’s leadership, serving the Society as its Parliamentarian and supporting its student activities, bringing the voices of younger members into SAS planning and future directions. The Society for Applied Spectroscopy is grateful for Jay’s years of distinguished service.
Previous Awardees:
1981 Edwin S. Hodge*
1982 James J. Devlin, S.J.*
1983 Jeanette G. Grasselli-Brown
1984 Alvin Bober
1985 Andrew Rekus*
1986 John R. Ferraro*,G. Vernon Wheeler*
1987 Willam G. Fateley*, C.L. Grant
1988 Abram Davis*, I. D'Arcy Brent II*
1989 James E. Paterson*
1990 O. Karmie Galle*
1991 John A. Dean
1992 Genevieve M. Bonini*, James R. Lindsay*
1993 No Award Given
1994 F. Monte Evens*, Wilbur Kaye*
1995 Jack E. Katon*
1996 No Award Given
1997 Constance Butler Sobel
1998 Marvin Margoshes
1999 Michael Epstein,Truman Waugh
2000 James A. Holcombe, Wolfgang Kiefer
2001 John R. Jackovitz*, Nancy J. Miller-Ihli
2002 Douglas L. Shrader
2003 David Coleman, Patricia Coleman
2004 Kathryn Kalasinsky
2005 Rina K. Dulor
2006 Joseph Caruso*
2007 Laurence A. Nafie
2008 Peter Griffiths, Deborah Bradshaw
2009 Paul Farnsworth, Joel Harris
2010 Alexander Scheeline
2011 Michael Carrabba
2012 David Butcher
2013 Bruce Chase
2014 Curt Marcott
2015 Gloria Story
2016 James de Haseth
2017 Geoffrey Coleman, Brian Perry
2018 Ian R. Lewis, Diane B. Parry
2019 Michael W. Blades, Deborah Peru
2020 Paul Bourassa*, Mary Kate Donais
2021 No Award
2022 Howard L. Mark
2023 Robert J. Lascola
2024 Jay Kitt
*deceased
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