Professor awarded American Chemical Society medal
Professor Milton Hearn. Photo credit: Steve Morton.
Professor Milton Hearn has received the 2015 American Chemical Society (ACS) Alan S. Michaels Award.
The award, given by the ACS Division of Biochemical Technology, recognises outstanding research and practice contributions toward the advancement of science and technology for the recovery of biological products.
This is Professor Hearn's second ACS award for 2015. Last year, he was awarded the prestigious 2015 American Chemical Society Award in Chromatography.
Professor Hearn, Associate Director (Industry) of the University’s Green Chemical Futures, and lead scientist for the Victorian Centre for Sustainable Chemical Manufacturing, said receiving the award was a great honour, and showed that Monash can produce groundbreaking science with global impact.
“Personally, it was a surprise and most humbling to learn that I was the recipient of this 2015 award, when the extraordinary calibre of the discoveries and achievements of previous recipients is considered,” Professor Hearn said. "It also provides the encouragement to pursue, at a high level, scientific fields of investigation that have impact and industrial relevance at a time when STEM funding is under constraint in Australia."
“The fundamental research and its translation to practice, which underpin this recognition, has provided new avenues to produce safe and effective drugs, particularly biopharmaceuticals, as well as to allow a myriad of other applications in the life and chemical sciences to be advanced by the academic and industrial research community worldwide.”
Professor Hearn has authored more than 600 original scientific papers and has made many other contributions to the chemical and biotechnology industry and the public within Australia and overseas.
Professor Hearn has received many awards, including a Centennial Medal of the Commonwealth of Australia and the American Chemical Society Green Chemistry Institute’s Distinguished Lecturer Award (2013). The Royal Australian Chemical Institute has awarded him the Leighton Memorial Medal, the Green Chemistry Challenge Medal, the R.K. Murphy Medal, the Analytical Chemistry Medal, the Applied Research Medal and the H.G. Smith Medal. He has also received an Alexander von Humboldt Forschungspreis, and numerous other national and international medals and awards for his pioneering work at the forefront of the separation sciences, analytical chemistry and biotechnology.
The awards will be conferred at the 2015 Spring National Meeting of the ACS in Denver, Colorado, from 22 to 26 March 2015.
The ACS, with more than 161,000 members, is the world’s largest scientific society and one of the world’s leading sources of authoritative scientific information.