Dasgupta receives national honor for exemplary contributions to analytical chemistry

Thursday, Oct 10, 2024 • Greg Pederson :

Purnendu "Sandy" Dasgupta, the Hamish Small Chair in Ion Analysis Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UTA.

Purnendu “Sandy” Dasgupta, the Hamish Small Chair in Ion Analysis Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Texas at Arlington, is being honored with a national award which is the highest recognition for an analytical chemist in North America.

The 2025 Award in Analytical Chemistry from the American Chemical Society (ACS) will be presented at the ACS Spring National Meeting in San Diego in March. The citation for Dasgupta’s award reads: “For contributions to novel analytical instrumentation and demonstrating their utility to improve health and nutrition.”

A separate symposium to recognize his contributions will be held during the ACS Fall 2025 meeting in Washington, DC.

“Everyone knows that professors mostly claim credit for what their students do,” said Dasgupta, who has mentored hundreds of students and visiting scholars and supervised dozens of doctoral and master’s students. “I have been fortunate enough to have wonderful students — this recognition goes to them, more than it is for me.”

The ACS is the world’s largest scientific society and the premier home of chemistry professionals. The award is sponsored by the ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry and recognizes outstanding contributions to the science of analytical chemistry, a major subdiscipline in chemistry, in the United States or Canada. Dasgupta is the first person of South Asian descent to receive the award, which has been given continuously since 1948.

“The prestigious ACS Award in Analytical Chemistry is a well-deserved recognition of Dr. Dasgupta’s exceptional accomplishments and scholarship,” said Morteza Khaledi, dean of the College of Science. “He is among the greatest innovators and inventors in his field, and he continues to make all of us at UTA very proud.”

This is not the first time that Dasgupta has received ACS honors. He also received the ACS Award in Chemical Instrumentation in 2018, the J. Calvin Giddings Award in Chemical Education in 2015, the Southwest Region ACS Award in 2012, and the ACS National Award in Chromatography in 2011.

Dasgupta, who is also an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Physics and the Department of Electrical Engineering, has made significant contributions to many areas. These include ion and liquid chromatography, arsenic detection, perchlorate detection, and dried blood spot analysis. His research has received tens of millions of dollars in funding from sources including NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

“Analytical chemistry is as much engineering as it is chemistry as the science is very much instrumentation dependent,” Dasgupta said. “I did not have any formal training in analytical chemistry. It was not taught as a discipline in India when I grew up. Hardly any colleges had any instrumentation to speak of. Even now, few universities have a formal program in analytical chemistry.

“Nevertheless, my interest in tinkering was fostered throughout by my parents. My father was a college professor in a small town in Bengal; we were hardly wealthy. Still, when we were able to have a house of our own, my father arranged for a separate space for me to have a laboratory and furnished it with a lab bench, sink, various chemicals, and glassware, along with a test tube heater of his own design. Obviously, I had a substantial advantage over many!

“The second thing that had a great impact was a substantial package of foreign textbooks, mostly from the U.S., that I received as part of a competitive National Science Talent Scholarship. These were not even available in our college library. Learning about analytical instrumentation from books opened an unseen world in my imagination.”

Dasgupta has authored or co-authored more than 450 publications and to date has published more papers in Analytical Chemistry, the preeminent journal in the field, than any other author. He also holds some 46 U.S. patents, the majority of which have been licensed.

Among the honors Dasgupta has received in his career are the Talanta Gold Medal Award in Analytical Chemistry from the Talanta Journal in 2018; the Texas Distinguished Scientist Award from the Texas Academy of Science in 2018; elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2015; Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Warsaw from the Fulbright Foundation in 2013; Stephen Dal Nogare Award in Chromatography from the Delaware Valley Chromatography Forum in 2012; and Wilfred T. Doherty Award for Chemical Research, DFW Section of ACS, in 2012; among many others.

Dasgupta came to UTA in 2007 after 25 years as part of the chemistry faculty at Texas Tech University. He received a B.S. degree in Chemistry and an M.S. degree in Inorganic Chemistry from University of Burdwan in his native India and earned a Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry from Louisiana State University in 1977. He worked for three years as an assistant research chemist at the California Primate Research Center studying inhalation toxicology of air pollutants and as an adjunct faculty member in Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Davis before taking a faculty position at Texas Tech.

The UTA Department of Chemistry and local chapter of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) will co-host a seminar by Dasgupta titled “Chemist, Engineer, or Tinkerer? Purnendu or Sandy? The journey of a boy from a small town in Bengal to Arlington, Texas” at 3 p.m. Friday, November 1 in CRB 114. The public is invited.

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