Professor Ryan Bailey has been named to receive the 2015 Pittcon Achievement Award. The Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy (Pittcon), is the largest meeting in the area of analytical chemistry; their Achievement Award recognizes “individuals for outstanding achievements in the fields of analytical chemistry and/or applied spectroscopy within 10 years after completion of their Ph.D. work.” Last year, Prof. Bailey won the Findeis Award from the American Chemical Society, and thus joins our former colleague Neil Kelleher among a very small group of faculty members ever to win both major early career awards in analytical chemistry (and only the second non-mass spectrometrist to win both). Prof. Bailey will accept the award at Pittcon's meeting in March.

Prof. Bailey received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from Eastern Illinois University in 1999. He then went on to Northwestern University, obtaining his Ph.D. in 2004. Following a joint post-doctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology and the Institute for Systems Biology, he joined the faculty at Illinois in 2006 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2012. In addition to his appointment in the Department of Chemistry, he is affiliated with the University of Illinois' Institute for Genomic Biology. In his research laboratories, Prof. Bailey is developing new bioanalytical tools to understand the onset and progression of diseases such as cancer, and the invention of new immunotherapeutic treatments. His goal is to facilitate personalized diagnosis and individualized treatment by providing a more detailed picture of the biomolecular signatures of disease from a single patient. On account of their simplicity, scalability, and molecular generality, these tools also have broad applicability to many aspects of clinical and pharmaceutical research as well as fundamental biological studies.

In addition to the Findeis Award, he has received several prestigious awards, including being named a Research Fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and as one of “Tomorrow’s PIs” by Genome Technology Magazine. He was named a Finalist for Biosensors & Bioelectronics Award from the World Congress of Biosensors (2010), and has won the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, the National Institutes of Health Director's New Innovator Award, the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation New Faculty Award, and the Outstanding Young Alumnus award from Eastern Illinois University. In addition, at University of Illinois, UC, he has been a Beckman Fellow in the Center for Advanced Study, has been named a Helen Corley Petit Scholar in LAS, has won the Teaching Excellence Award of the School of Chemical Sciences, and has been named to the List of Faculty Ranked as Excellent by Their Students.

Partially excerpted from an email by Gregory Girolami

Photo by L. Brian Stauffer