At the recent SCIX 2015 conference held September 27 - October 2 at the Rhode Island Convention Center in Providence, RI, graduate students from the Myrick, Angel, and Morgan research groups won a number of awards for their scientific presentations.

Stephanie DeJong, from the Myrick research group, won the Tomas Hirschfeld Scholar Award for an outstanding paper submitted to the conference by a graduate student.  The paper, "Reversible Gap Derivative and their Integration," (coauthored with Zhenyu Lu, Brianna Cassidy, Stephen L. Morgan, and M.L. Myrick), was accepted for publication in Applied Spectroscopy.

DeJong also won the Coblentz Society Student Award for outstanding research in vibrational spectroscopy, based on her oral presentation, "Integration of Higher-order Gap Derivatives," (coauthored with Zhenyu Lu, Brianna Cassidy, Stephen L. Morgan, and Michael L. Myrick).

Zhenyu Lu, from the Morgan research group, won the FACSS Student Poster Award in Spectroscopy for his poster presentation titled, "Estimation of the Age of Bloodstains under Different Environmental Conditions with Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy and Multivariate Statistical Analysis," (coauthored with Brianna Cassidy, Stephanie Dejong, Katherine Witherspoon, Michael L. Myrick, and Stephen L. Morgan).

Brianna Cassidy, from the Morgan research group, also won a FACSS Student Poster Award for her poster, "An Experimental Study of the Forensic Luminol Test for Detection of Bloodstains," (coauthored with Zhenyu Lu, Katherine Witherspoon, Jennifer Martin, Stephanie DeJong, Ray Belliveau, Michael Myrick and Stephen Morgan.

Nirmal Lamsal, from the Angel research group, won the Wiley Raman Student Award, for outstanding research by a graduate student in any area of Raman spectroscopy.  His paper was titled "Standoff UV Raman Spectroscopy: Spatial Heterodyne Raman Spectrometer for Planetary Applications", with S. Michael Angel, Shiv Sharma, and Tayro Acosta-Maeda.

The meeting program gives a detailed outline of the conference activities.