BLACKSBURG, Va., July 20, 2000 -- Harold McNair of the Virginia Tech chemistry department has won the Year 2000 Calvin Giddings Award from the Analytical Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
The award recognizes outstanding contribution to the field of analytical chemistry, both in teaching and research. Calvin Giddings was an outstanding educator at the University of Utah and a prolific writer, with more than 1000 technical publications and more than eight textbooks to his credit. The award, together with a $5,000 prize, will be presented to McNair Aug. 21 at the national meeting of the ACS in Washington, D.C.
McNair did his undergraduate work at the University of Arizona graduate studies at Purdue University and was a Fulbright post-doctoral fellow at Eindhoven Technical University, the Netherlands. He came to Virginia Tech in 1968 and has been awarded both national and international awards in teaching and research, including the Tswett Medal in Chromatography from the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Colacro Medal, the Keene Dimick Award, and the Dal Nogare Award. He has published more than 150 original research papers and supervised more than 50 graduate theses.
McNair's research interests are the isolation, concentration, and characterization of organic molecules by gas chromatography, gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, and high-performance liquid chromatography. His current analyses of interest include pesticides in soils and foods, biogenic amines in fish, trace bomb residues in air, water, and soil samples, polynuclear aromatics (PNA's) and polychlorinated byphenyls (PCB's) in water and soils.
"One project involves the use of microwaves to rapidly extract pesticides from soil samples and determine trace levels (parts per billion) using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry,." McNair said. The research has been partially funded by both CEM Corp. of Mathews, N.C., and E.I. duPont of Wilmongton, Del.
"We have developed a rapid, six-minute direct analysis, by gas chromatography, of nine carbamate pesticides," McNair said. "The method relies on a fast gas-chromatography technique that uses short columns, thin films, and fast flow rates and a cold-on-column injector, which is a new technique that keeps the carbamate at room temperature for injection into the gas chromatography instrument."
McNair also has been actively working on bomb vapors on behalf of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for the past three years, supported by a three-year, $320,000 grant from the FAA Technical Center in Atlantic City, N.J. "One environmental aspect is to develop simple field sampling methods to trap odors characteristic of bombs or other toxic materials, McNair said. "We later use a variety of techniques, including gas chromatography, high-performance liquid chromatography, and Headspace gas chromatography/mass spectrometry to determine the quantity of the trace levels."
A part of the Giddings award is for teaching, and McNair enjoys teaching both graduate and undergraduate classes and a variety of short courses, mostly for the ACS.
McNair will present a lecture on "Cal Giddings and temperature programming" (ANYL 125) at the ACS national meeting. "Professor Giddings publication in the Journal of Chemical Education 39 569 (1962) is one of the most useful and clear presentations of temperature programming for gas chromatography," McNair says. Chartered by Congress, the ACS is a world leader in fostering chemical education and research. With an international membership of 161,000, it is the largest scientific society in the world.
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