Join us in expressing a warm congratulations to our own Dr. Vicki Wysocki for receiving the 2017 Frank H. Field and Joe L. Franklin Award for Outstanding Achievement in Mass Spectrometry! This award is given out to one recipient every year in order to recognize their outstanding achievements in the development or application of mass spectrometry. Sponsored by the Waters Corporation since 2007, this award includes $5,000, a special certificate, and up to $2,500 for travel expenses so that the recipient may attend the award ceremony.

Dr. Vicki Wysocki was named the recipient of this award due to her outstanding accomplishments in the development of surface-induced dissociation for native mass spectrometry structural characterization of noncovalent complexes. She is currently a professor in our Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and an Ohio Eminent Scholar. Dr. Wysocki received her BS in Chemistry at Western Kentucky University in 1982 and her PhD in Chemistry at Purdue University in 1987.

Dr. Wysocki’s recognition is well deserved and she has found inspiration in other scientists who also dedicate themselves to a career of research. When asked about her main role model, Dr. Wysocki named the Nobel Prize winner John Fenn: “He 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.” In addition, she also says that Carol Robinson of Oxford has also been a great role mode: “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.”

Many of her colleagues see this same sense of dedication to learning in Dr. Wysokci’s work. Dr. Facundo Fernandez at the Georgia Institute of Technology says: “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.” We here at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry completely agree! Join us once again in congratulating Dr. Vicki Wysocki on her award!