Theophilus Redwood Award 2009 winner

Awarded for his outstanding contribution to the development and application of secondary ion mass spectrometry techniques for surface analysis and 3D chemical imaging of organic and biological systems.

About the winner

John Vickerman was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1943.  He gained a first class BSc in Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh in 1964 and has a PhD and DSc from the University of Bristol.  After post-doctoral research at Bristol and in Eindhoven, in 1970 he took up an appointment at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology.

He has spent sabbatical research periods at the University of Munich as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow with Prof Gerhard Ertl, at the Free University of Berlin and on a number of occasions at Penn State University in the US with Prof Nicholas Winograd.  

Building on an early career focused on basic surface chemistry and catalysis, his group has made a major contribution to understanding the fundamental phenomenology and developing SIMS as a molecular mass spectrometry with the analytical power to probe chemical complexity at a level that defeats other techniques. Around 280 publications have resulted and more than 50 research students have gained their doctorates.

This work has contributed to the industrial exploitation of SIMS for applied surface analysis of complex materials. Several instrument developments have emerged from the work including most recently the buckminsterfullerene (C60+) ion beam system and a completely new ToF-SIMS instrument specifically configured for 2D and 3D imaging of biological materials.

In 2004 he was awarded the Rivière Prize of the UK Surface Analysis Forum - 'for work which has been judged outstanding in its continuing and lasting contribution to surface analysis'.  

His present appointment is as Research Professor in the School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science at the University of Manchester where he leads a research group in the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre devoted to applying imaging mass spectrometry in biological research.