The Society for Applied Spectroscopy (SAS) Emeritus Membership Award was presented to Dr. Howard J. Mark of Mark Electronics for his contributions to spectroscopy. Dr. Mark was awarded the B.S. Degree in Chemistry from the City College of New York in 1963, the M.A. Degree in Chemistry from the City University of New York in 1966, where he became interested in the application of electronics and instrumentation to chemical analysis, applied to the measurement of air pollution. He was awarded the Ph.D. degree in Physical Chemistry from New York University in 1972 and remains at NYU as a research fellow, performing research in application of the then-new field of FTIR spectroscopy, adapting and modifying the FTIR hardware and software to specialized measurement situations.
Dr. Mark joined Technicon Instrument Corp. in 1976, for development and applications of the then-new field of near-infrared analysis. While at Technicon, he learned about the power and usage of the science of Statistics, and later, Chemometrics. He created, designed, and developed new algorithms for NIR quantitative and qualitative analysis and applied statistical and chemometric methods to optimize in-house test procedures. He was the first spectroscopist to apply the concept of Mahalanobis Distance to spectroscopic analysis. Dr. Mark began writing (with Jerry Workman) a series of columns “Statistics in Spectroscopy” (later “Chemometrics in Spectroscopy”), a series that is still on-going. He wrote several books to explain the concepts involved in statistical thinking, in terms meaningful for chemists.
When Technicon closed, Dr. Mark became an independent consultant and is currently president of Mark Electronics, a consulting company providing services in the fields of near-infrared analysis, chemometric and statistical data analysis, and custom instrument design and development. He is also founder and president of The Near Infrared Research Corp., designing,, developing, and marketing both custom and standard accessories for near-infrared instrumentation, and also novel and unique software applications in addition to the hardware products.
Dr. Mark was awarded the 2003 Eastern Analytical Symposium Award for Outstanding Achievement in Near Infrared Spectroscopy, and the Williams-Wright Award from the Coblentz Society at Pittcon 2011. He is past-chair and past-secretary of the Council for Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (CNIRS), past-chair and past-treasurer of the New York SAS Section and is exhibit committee chair for the International Diffuse Reflectance Conference. He is an active member of the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), and is chair of the Terminology subcommittee of the Molecular Spectroscopy committee of the ASTM. He has authored or co-authored seven patents, over 190 publications, 85 oral presentations, and 13 books and book chapters on NIR analysis and on the application of statistics and chemometrics to spectroscopic analysis.