Chemist Erin Baker was honored today with a "Rising Star" award at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco. The award recognizeswomen chemists who have demonstrated outstanding promise for contributions to their fields of science.

Baker, an expert on mass spectrometry at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, first caught the science bug while a teenager on her family's ranch in central Montana. Arsenic and cyanide pollution in area streams was linked to a local gold mining operation, and Baker helped her family understand the chemistry involved.

Now Baker is part of a PNNL team that is creating new ways to apply mass spectrometry and related techniques to learn more about a range of issues more quickly and with ever-smaller samples. Current research topics that Baker and colleagues are exploring include pre-eclampsia, tuberculosis, breast cancer and Alzheimer's disease, as well as the activities of microbial communities that help shape our environment.

For an overview of Baker's work and the ACS award, view this article.