Spectroscopy society presents gold medal to CCNY scientist John Lombardi

City College of New York chemistry professor John R. Lombardi is the New York Society for Applied Spectroscopy 2019 Gold Medal winner. This award was established in 1952 to recognize outstanding contributions to the field of applied spectroscopy. He will receive the medal at a special award ceremony in Princeton, New Jersey, in November. The event will coincide with the society’s Eastern Analytical Symposium.   

Lombardi’s research in Raman spectroscopy spans more than four decades.

Although normal Raman spectroscopy is inherently a weak effect, it can be considerably strengthened by the proximity of a molecule to a metal or semiconductor surface. Thus, this field is called “surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy” (SERS). This enormous enhancement enables the design and construction of molecular sensors that are selective and highly sensitive.

In addition to various experimental contributions, such as extension of the useful surfaces to semiconductors, papers by Lombardi and his CCNY collaborator Ronald Birke have established a theoretical basis for understanding the SERS mechanism.

This combination has allowed development of schemes to optimize the sensitivity of sensors based on the SERS effect, which has practical applications to detection of trace quantities of molecules. This has led to important advances in both the field of cultural heritage studies (in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art) as well as in a forensic context -- in collaboration with scientists at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Lombardi has had more than 250 articles published in peer-reviewed journals.

On the faculty in City College’s Division of Science since 1975, Lombardi studied chemistry at Cornell University (A.B.) and Harvard (M.A., Ph.D.).

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Jay Mwamba
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e: jmwamba@ccny.cuny.edu

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