Sponsored by the University of Windsor
This award is presented to a senior scientist residing in Canada who has made a distinguished contribution to the field of analytical chemistry while working in Canada. It is available to government, industry, and academia, on a rotating basis.
View the Terms of Reference and list of Past Winners
The 2026 winner of the Ricardo Aroca Award is:
Andre Simpson, MCIC
University of Toronto
Professor Simpson has pioneered NMR development for environmental research. His early work focused on unravelling soil’s chemical structure and understanding contaminant binding. Since then, he developed real-time in-vivo NMR to understand and explain contaminant toxicity. On this journey he has pioneered many new NMR-based analytical technologies including;
Comprehensive Multiphase NMR an approach that combines solution-, gel- and solid-state NMR into a single NMR probe. It can be used for processes that involve phase change (i.e. Alzheimer’s amyloid crystallization or heterogeneous catalysis). When applied in-vivo it is the only modern analytical approach that can access all bonds from the most soluble (metabolites) to most solid (bone or exoskeleton).
Novel Micro and Nano- NMR coils that were exploited to discover 6PPD-quinonem a car tire derived chemical which is responsible for killing 90% of the world’s wild Salmon.
Unique NMR Approaches. The most famous “DREAMTIME” negates overlap in NMR allowing the user to select any suite of molecules from a mixture along with a >10 fold increase in sensitivity. While SSFP-CRAFT NMR increases NMR detection limits by 50 fold directly identifying perfluorinated species in human blood, polar bear liver, tap water etc. demonstrating the need for NMR as a crucial environmental discovery tool.