The Royal Society of Chemistry has announced that , the Grace-Rupley Professor of Chemistry at the University of Notre Dame, will be awarded the 2012 Robert Boyle Prize for Analytical Science.

The biennial prize is given to the candidate whose work is of the broadest relevance to the chemical science community as a whole and whose career is defined by exceptional work, excellence and dedication. It includes a £5,000 cash award, a medal and a lecture tour of the U.K. The prize will be formally presented Nov. 9 in Birmingham, England.

Dovichi joined Notre Dame in 2010. His research group was partially responsible for the primary analytical instrument—capillary array electrophoresis with laser-induced fluorescence detection in a sheath flow cuvette—used by the in its successful effort to determine the primary structure of the human genome.

Now that the genome is sequenced, interest is focused on the study of the proteome, which is the protein content of an organism, tissue or cell. The Dovichi group is developing tools to study the proteome with two-dimensional capillary electrophoresis, coupled to either laser-induced fluorescence or mass spectrometry for detection.

The group’s long-term goal is to study protein expression in single cells and to determine how protein expression changes across a cellular population during cancer progression and during the development of an embryo. In the shorter term, it is developing tools to characterize post-translational modifications of proteins and to speed digestion and analysis of proteins.

Contact: Norman Dovichi 574-631-2778, Norman.J.Dovichi.1@nd.edu

A multi-university research group which includes several University of Notre Dame and graduate students, has recently published a paper detailing new work on the analysis and dating of human bruises. The research, which is funded by the Gerber Foundation, will have particular application to pediatric medicine, as bruise age is often key evidence in child abuse cases.

Using a combination of modeling and spectroscopy measurements, the researchers have advanced our understanding of the changing composition of aging bruises and developed new tools for detailed biomedical studies of human skin tissue.

Spectroscopic measurement determines the chemical composition of tissue by measuring the extent to which it absorbs and reflects light of different wave lengths. In this case, the researchers examined accidental bruises to determine their concentrations of bilirubin, blood volume fraction, and blood oxygenation, which peak at various periods after contusion occurs.

The data were combined with modeling via Monte Carlo methods, which are often used to simulate highly complex systems—like the propagation of electromagnetic waves in healthy and contused skin — involving many interacting degrees of freedom. The result was a multilayered model in which each layer is characterized by a number of parameters, including thickness of layer, absorption and scattering properties, refractive index, and scattering anisotropy factors. Previous research had produced models simulating only one to three layers of skin; this one simulates seven, allowing for a much clearer spectroscopic picture of a bruise’s composition and age.

The paper, titled “” is published in the current issue of . The authors are Oleg Kim (Notre Dame), John McMurdy (Brown University), Collin Lines (Notre Dame), Susan Duffy (Hasbro Children’s Hospital), (Notre Dame) and (Notre Dame).

Contact: Marissa Gebhard, 574-631-4465, gebhard.3@nd.edu