The award, sponsored by ThermoFisher Scientific, was presented at the 19th International Mass Spectrometry Conference held in Kyoto, Japan this year.

Professor Ouyang is currently an Associate Professor in the Weldon School. He started as an engineering student in Automatic Control at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, and obtained a bachelor's and Master's degree from the Department of Automation. He then went to the University of West Virginia to study Raman spectroscopy and received his 2nd Master's degree from there in Physical Chemistry. In 1997, he came to Purdue to explore mass spectrometry and received his PhD in Analytical Chemistry in 2002.

Dr. Ouyang has a broad interest in developing instrumentation and applications for mass spectrometry. He has established and maintained a research group consisting of students and researchers with knowledge and complementary skills in engineering, physics, and chemistry. His main achievements in research include the electromagnetic and hydrodynamic simulation methods for ion transfer and mass analysis, algorithms and methods for signal and data processing, ion trap mass analyzers and arrays of simple geometries, discontinuous atmospheric pressure interface for miniature vacuum systems, low temperature plasma probe and paper spray ionization for direct chemical analysis, and miniature MS analysis systems for chemical analysis and biomedical diagnosis.

He has published more than 90 research papers and received several awards, including the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation Early Career Translational Research Award in Biomedical Engineering, China National Natural Science Foundation Award for Distinguished Overseas Young Scholars, USA National Science Foundation Early Career Award, and the American Society for Mass Spectrometry Research Award.