2026 Award Winner - Applied Spectroscopy William F. Meggers Award
Please join us in congratulating our 2026 Meggers Award Winner!
R.S. Jakubek et al., Calibration of Raman Bandwidths on the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) Deep Ultraviolet Raman and Fluorescence Instrument Aboard the Perseverance Rover, Volume 79, Issue 6, June 2025, pp. 904–918.
Ryan Jakubek received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh in 2019 under the advisement of Dr. Sanford A. Asher. His doctoral research focused on using Raman spectroscopy to study polyglutamine protein misfolding and its relationship to neurodegenerative diseases.
Upon graduation, Ryan joined Jacobs Technology (now Amentum Technology) as a contract scientist in the Curation Department at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC). At JSC, he applies Raman spectroscopy in support of NASA’s Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation Office and conducts research across a wide range of planetary science topics. These include the characterization of meteoritic organic carbon, investigations of lunar icy regolith, development of Raman instrumentation and data-processing techniques, and support of the SHERLOC deep-UV Raman and fluorescence instrument aboard the Perseverance rover.
His work on SHERLOC includes ground-truthing flight data using a terrestrial analog instrument and developing analytical and data-processing methods to maximize the scientific return from Raman data acquired on Mars.
