Coblentz Society CLARA Craver Award

The Coblentz Society has created an award to recognize young individuals who have made significant contributions in applied analytical vibrational spectroscopy.

The Craver Award is presented annually to an outstanding young molecular spectroscopist whose efforts are in the area of applied analytical vibrational spectroscopy. The candidate must be under the age of 45 on January 1st of the year of the award. The work may include any aspect of infrared (NIR, MIR, or Far), and/or THz, and/or Raman spectroscopy in applied analytical vibrational spectroscopy. The nominees may come from an academic, government lab, or industrial backgrounds. Click here for information on the Coblentz Society Craver Award.

2020 Coblentz Society Craver Award Recipient

Dr. Claudia Conti is a senior researcher at the Institute of Heritage Science (ISPC) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) where she leads the Raman Spectroscopy Laboratory. Through her PhD in Material Engineering (Milan Polytechnic, 2010), under the direction of Professor Giuseppe Zerbi, and her research at ISPC-CNR, she established expertise in the area of advanced applications of vibrational spectroscopy to the material analysis, in particular, in Cultural Heritage. 

She identified critical needs in conservation sciences and searched for innovative solutions. In 2012, she established a major collaboration with Prof. Pavel Matousek to explore a novel tool developed by him that enables Raman sensing deep inside turbid media on macro-scale. She conducted her research through several scientific visits (2014-2018) to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (Oxford, UK) that lead to the successful transformation of macro-SORS conceptually to the area of Cultural Heritage and the demonstration of a new SORS variant, micro-SORS, capable of resolving micrometer thick layers of paint for the first time. 

Since 2014, Claudia was coordinating and managing research activities in micro-SORS at ISPC-CNR. This lead to establishing the feasibility of a simpler variant of micro-SORS (defocusing) applicable readily in the area of cultural heritage and elsewhere. A research into the most potent variant of full micro-SORS was also carried out by her at ISPC-CNR and at the Northwestern University in Chicago where she was a visiting scientist in 2019 developing a research project aimed at combining micro-SORS with Surface Enhance Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) for application in Cultural heritage and elsewhere. 

Call For Nominations

Please refer to the Coblentz website for further details

Past Recipients

2019       Shawn (Xiaoyun) Chen

2018       Christy Haynes

2017 Martin Zanni

2016 Karen Faulds

2015 Ji-Xin Cheng 

2014 Lynne S. Taylor

2013 Rohit Bhargava -

2012 Duncan Graham 

2011 Michael W. George

2010 Boris Mizaikoff

2009 Takeshi Hasegawa

2008 John C. Conboy

2007 Katherine Bakeev