Other Awards and Honors
2010 Awards
Dick Smith Named R&D's 2010 Scientist of the Year
Parkinson's disease, cancer, and biofuels production are just a few problems Dick Smith has helped untangle in his long career of technological innovation and scientific insight. Now, R&D Magazine has honored Smith, PNNL's Director of Proteomics and Battelle Fellow, as 2010 Scientist of the Year for his many significant contributions to science.
Smith is one of the most-published scientists in the field of proteomics, which seeks to understand biology by the complement of proteins at work within organisms, tissues, or cells. Since the Human Genome Project developed a blueprint of all human genes in human chromosomes earlier in this century, proteomics researchers have pushed to understand how the blueprint creates life.
Over the last 15 years Smith has led the development of measurement platforms that have made proteomics practical. In the last few years, he has driven efforts that trimmed analytical steps from days and hours to minutes. The increase in speed has opened important new areas for study. Smith led other advances in sensitivity and accuracy that greatly improved clinical researchers' ability to find rare proteins, bringing proteomics technology to their doorstep.
Smith and collaborators applied the technology to liver disease and cancer in the hopes of finding rare markers of disease in blood, making diagnosis or treatment safer and faster. Smith also looked at how bacteria and viruses might cause illnesses, investigated traces in the blood left behind by breast cancer that in the near future may be exploited by doctors, led studies for DOE into possible roles for microbes in making biofuels and examined how large environmental communities of microbes function in our ecosystem and affect our environment.
Much of Smith and his group's cutting-edge technology — including mass spectrometers beefed up with ion funnels, electrospray ionization and other new technologies he has been key in developing — is housed at EMSL, DOE's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory on the PNNL campus, and a number of the developments have been licensed to private companies. (announced 11/1/2010)