The FACSS Governing Board presents a Distinguished Service Award to an individual who has demonstrated exceptional, long-term service to the FACSS organization. Typically, that person will have served with excellence in many different capacities and will have contributed to the continuing success of FACSS through consistent dedication and sacrifice.

A candidate for the Distinguished Service Award must be nominated via a written petition, which enumerates the candidate's major contributions. The petition must be signed by at least four delegates, each representing a different member organization of FACSS. The signed petition must be submitted to the executive committee at least 30 days beforethe Governing Board meeting held at Pittcon in order to be considered and presented at the annualconference. A Distinguished Service Award will be awarded to the candidate if the Governing Board approved the petition by a majority vote.

The award will be presented at the FACSS conference.

Alexander Scheeline is Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a native of Hollidaysburg, PA. He attended Michigan State University, where he did research with S. R. Crouch in heteropolymolybdate kinetics. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the direction of J. P. Walters, focusing on plasma diagnostics of bipolar pulse spark discharges. Following a National Research Council post-doctoral fellowship at the National Institute for Standards and Technology, he was assistant professor at the University of Iowa before moving to Illinois. He served as Program Officer in Analytical and Surface Chemistry at the National Science Foundation for one year. Current research interests are in instrument development (ultrasonically-levitated drops as microreactors), reactive oxygen species, oscillatory reactions, nonlinear dynamics, and noise-induced hearing loss.

Scheeline first attended FACSS II in Indianapolis as a graduate student. With only 4 exceptions, he has attended every meeting since. With Richard Sacks and Joel Goldberg, he sparked the annual "Rodney Danger(ous)field Symposium" on high voltage, high current discharges for elemental analysis. He was assistant program chair (assisting Matt Klee) for the last of a string of meetings in suburban Philadelphia, and then program chair for the 1986 meeting in St. Louis. In response to Tomas Hirschfeld's premature demise, he was instrumental in establishing an award for inventive graduate students in Hirschfeld's honor and memory. Together with Syd Fleming, he participated in the beginnings of electronic publishing in Applied Spectroscopy by submitting the FACSS Preliminary Program to the Journal that year. He and Fleming helped negotiate the joint meeting the Pacific Conference in 1991. He chaired the governing board in 1989. In subsequent years, he served on the board, representing ACS or SAS, served on the long range planning committee, and continued to arrange symposia.

In addition to his activity in support of FACSS, Scheeline is a member of the American Chemical Society, The Electrochemical Society, Society of Electroanalytical Chemists, Society for Free Radical Biology and Medicine, Association for Research in Otolaryngology, Coblentz Society, Optical Society of America, the EPR Society, Sigma Xi, Phi Kappa Phi, Alpha Chi Sigma, and a fellow of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy. He is on the editorial board of Biophysical Chemistry and editor of the Journal of the Analytical Sciences Digital Library. He is one of six members of the Chemistry faculty at Illinois to teach the standard undergraduate curriculum at the Faculty of Chemistry, Hanoi University of Science. In his "copious" free time, he is a history buff, playing popular piano and vocal music from the early 20^th century and the occasional ditty by Tom Lehrer. A notable character flaw is a tendency to punning.

Past Recipients:
2009 - Paul Bourassa and Mike Carrabba
2003 - Jeanette Grasselli Brown
2001 - David Coleman
1994 - L. Felix Schneider
1993 - Edward Brame and Syd Fleming