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Paing recently was awarded the Innovations in Nuclear Technology R&D Award from the Department of Energy. With his research, Paing hopes to deconvolute some of the mechanisms and processes occurring in LS–APGD. Paing is working on developing the liquid sampling atmospheric pressure glow discharge plasma (LS–APGD) as a miniature ionization and excitation source for various applications from nuclear security to pharmaceutical analysis under the mentorship of Kenneth Marcus. Lesniewski hopes to further improve sensitivity of non-metal elemental analyses through exploring new ionization chemistries, and to expand the applications of elemental quantification in environmental and pharmaceutical investigations. At Georgetown, Lesniewski’s work focuses on addressing high-sensitivity elemental quantification of non-metals, such as chlorine and fluorine, for facile quantification of analytes without compound-specific standards. Prior to his work at Georgetown, he was twice awarded a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship, which supported his research at the National Institute of Technology (NIST) headquarters in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Lesniewski is working toward his PhD at Georgetown under the guidance of Kaveh Jorabchi. He has been an active science communicator and member of the SAS since 2017. His research interests focus on the development and application of optical spectrometry of transient diatomic molecules for trace analysis of non-metals and stable isotope analysis. While working toward his PhD under the supervision of Norbert Jakubowski and Ulrich Panne, he developed a passion for spectrochemical analysis using optical and mass spectrometry. He was a visiting scientist at the Leibniz-Institute for Analytical Science in Berlin, Germany from 2015–2018, and at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2018. Lesniewski, a PhD student at Georgetown University (Washington D.C.), Htoo Paing, a graduate student at Clemson University (Clemson, South Carolina), and Ingo Strenge, a final-year PhD candidate at the University of Seigen (Germany), received their awards on Tuesday October 15, at SciX 2019 in Palm Springs, California.Ībad earned his PhD in the spring of 2019 from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Carlos Abad, a postdoctoral researcher at the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM) (Germany), Joseph E. Four student researchers were presented with the Society for Applied Spectroscopy’s (SAS) Atomic Technical Section Student Award at SciX 2019.
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