IAGLR Honors Dr. Ron Hites with Lifetime Achievement Award

For IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 9, 2016

Contact: Lars Rudstam, IAGLR Aawards Committee Co-Chair, awardschair@iaglr.org

Guelph, Ontario — The International Association for Great Lakes Research (IAGLR) recently honored Dr. Ronald A. Hites, a professor at Indiana University, with the 2016 IAGLR Lifetime Achievement Award.

The award, presented at IAGLR’s 59th annual Conference on Great Lakes Research, recognizes important and continued contributions to the field of Great Lakes research over a period of 20 years or more. It is awarded on the basis of the recipient's scientific contribution, originality, and impact.

Hite’s work has made key and lasting contributions to Great Lakes science and beyond. Over the last four decades, Hites has made seminal contributions to IAGLR, the Great Lakes community, and the discipline of environmental organic chemistry in North America and worldwide; notably in the areas of mass spectrometry and the detection, sources, transformations, time trends, and fate of atmospherically derived organic pollutants in rivers and lakes.

Hites and his research group have conducted the U.S. portion of the Great Lakes Integrated Atmospheric Deposition Network (IADN) from 1994 projected now through 2020 for the US EPA. In so doing, he established IADN as the world’s leading research and monitoring atmospheric program for organic pollutants. Hites’ research activity has provided world-leading scientific understanding and policy choices on the role of the atmosphere in contaminating the North American Great Lakes and, by extension, worldwide. The research community has rightly recognized Hites as the father of modern environmental mass spectrometry, technology which he has advanced and applied throughout his career.

Currently a Distinguished Professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, Hites began his career as a graduate student at MIT where he was also a postdoctoral scholar before joining the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT as an assistant and associate professor. He moved to Indiana University in 1979. 

Hites has been recognized for his contributions, receiving many international awards and distinctions including the ACS Award for Advances in Environmental Science and Technology (1991), SETAC Founders Award (1993), Fellow of the AAAS (1996), ACS Fellow (2009), and SETAC Fellow (2014).