Distinguished Service Award

2007 DIVISION OF POLYMERIC MATERIALS: SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING
DISTINGUISHED SERVICE AWARD

Photography by Darrek Robertson/ www.imageartist.net

The recipient of the 2007 Distinguished Service Award, given by the ACS Division of Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering (PMSE) is George R. Pilcher. George has been active in PMSE since the days when it was known as the Organic Coatings and Plastics Division (ORPL), initially as Chair of the Symposium on Application Methods of Coatings, which was followed by several Symposia on High Solids Coatings, which George co-chaired with Prof. Frank N. Jones. In 1984, George was asked by PMSE to establish the Roy W. Tess Award, which honors outstanding contributors to the science and technology of coatings, and which has become one of the top awards in the field. In 1985, George became PMSE's membership chair, and then progressed through the offices to become Chair of PMSE in 1993. Since that time, George has served as a member on several PMSE committees, and has been the Educational Funding and Educational Outreach Chair for the past several years. George was named a PMSE Fellow in 2001.

George is a 1970 graduate in chemistry of the College of Wooster, and worked initially for The Sherwin-Williams Company, where he was principally involved with new product development and investigations into the failure mechanisms of PVC coatings. In 1981, he became the Corporate Technical Director of Hanna Chemical Coatings Corporation, the predecessor organization to Akzo Nobel Coatings Inc. At Akzo, George was the Technical Director for Coil and Extrusion Coatings in the Americas and the PRC, and he was responsible for polymer engineering and applied R&D for coatings technology.

In 1989, George was invited to contribute the paper, "Saturated Polyester Coatings," (co-authored with J. W. Stout) to The International Symposium on the History of Organic Coatings, which was organized in honor of Herman Mark's upcoming 95th birthday. The proceedings of this symposium were published the following year in book form by Elsevier as Organic Coatings: Their Origin and Development. In 1991, George organized and chaired the Gordon Research Conference on the Chemistry and Physics of Coatings and Films, and from 1993-1996, he served on the Advisory Board of the National Science Foundation Coatings Center, located at Eastern Michigan University. From 1988-1995, George was active as the President of the Coatings Industry Education Foundation, and he received the George Baugh Heckel Award in 1996 from the Federation of Societies for Coatings Technology. George served on the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Athens Conference from 1997-2003, and in 2004 served on the Scientific Committee which organized the first Coatings Science International conference (COSI), held in Nordwijk, The Netherlands, in 2005. He is the only American to be honored with the title of "Corresponding Member" by the Paints and Pigments Division of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (1995) and, in 2004, George delivered the Joseph J. Mattiello Memorial Address in Chicago. In May, 2006, he was the recipient of the American Chemical Society Columbus Section Award for "outstanding achievement, and promotion of the chemical sciences."

George has been an invited contributor to a wide array of international scientific symposia and conferences, and his many papers have been published in over twenty journals and three book chapters. He currently serves on the Editorial Review Board of J. Coatings Technology Research.

Past recipients of the Distinguished Service Award include:

1993	Roy W. Tess
1994	E. E. McSweeney
1995	Louis J. Nowacki
1996	Kenneth N. Edwards
1999	Clara D. Craver
2000	Sandy Labana
2001	John Lupinski
2002	Charles E. Carraher
2003	Theodore Provder
2004	Ray Dickie
2005	Larry F. Thompson
2006	S. Richard Turner
2007	George R. Pilcher

Past Distinguished Service Award Winners

2001 Service Award Winner

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