Jonathan W. Martin to receive 2006 Roy W. Tess Award.

The Officers and the Award Committee of the Division of Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering (PMSE) of the American Chemical Society have announced Jonathan W. Martin, of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, as the recipient of the Roy W. Tess Award for 2006.

Dr. Martin will receive the Tess Award from Dr. Ronald DeMartino, Chair of the PMSE Division, in recognition of outstanding contributions to coatings and science technology, at the 232nd meeting of the ACS on September 11, 2006 in San Francisco, CA.

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A member of the FSCT, Dr. Martin is recognized as one of the world's leading experts in the area of service life prediction of polymeric materials. As director of the NIST/Industry Consortium on Coating Service Life Prediction, he has organized three major symposia on service life prediction and edited three books based on these symposia for the ACS and FSCT. He has also published over 120 papers and presented numerous keynote lectures and plenary talks at national and international conferences, including four Gordon Conferences, the Coating Science International Symposium, and the European Weathering Symposium.

Dr. Martin earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Materials Science from Pennsylvania State University in 1968 and 1971, respectively. He received a Ph.D. in Materials Science from Washington State University in 1979. In 1978 he joined the Polymeric Materials Group in the Building and Fire Research Laboratory at NIST. He became Group Leader in 1994 and is responsible for the research work of 35 group members. He also directs the Polymer Interphase Consortium and the Sealants Service Life Prediction Consortium, in addition to the Coatings Service Life Consortium.

Implementing a reliability-based methodology for predicting the weathering service life of polymeric materials is Dr. Martin's main research interest. This methodology implementation has many aspects, including developing novel metrologies for characterizing coatings, deriving mathematical models for characterizing degradation, and for linking field and laboratory exposure results, as well as designing and creating high-throughput and informatics systems capable of improving measurement and data analysis efficiency. Recent progress toward this goal made by Dr. Martin and his team include the analysis of the validity of reciprocity and additivity laws of polymer degradation, specific models linking field and laboratory exposure environments, designing and building a novel laboratory exposure device (called the NIST SPHERE) that essentially removes all known sources of experimental error from exposures, and instrumenting and validating models for characterizing field exposure environments in near real-time and in the same way that these environments are characterized in the laboratory. He has also initiated an extensive research program in nano-physical and nano-chemical measurements for characterizing polymer degradation.

Dr. Martin has received numerous awards for his research work. From the FSCT, he has received the 1990 Best Corrosion Paper Award, 1995 Technical Focus Speaker Award, 2004 first place Roon Award, and the 2004 John Gordon Award. In November of 2006, he will present the prestigious Mattiello Memorial Lecture at the organization's Annual Meeting, November 1-3, in New Orleans, LA. He was the recipient of the 1996 Bronze Medal Award and the 2004 William P. Slichter Award from the U.S. Department of Commerce. He has also been given the R & D 100 Award for his research on the roughness of metallic surfaces using infrared thermography.

Dr. Martin will present an Award Address at the ACS meeting.