ALMA Award
ALMA’s Distinguished Service Award for Analytical Laboratory Management recognizes outstanding service to the profession of analytical laboratory management. It began in 2002 and is sponsored by Agilent Technologies.
2002 Winner
Dr. Claude Lucchesi
ALMA’s first Distinguished Service Award was presented to Dr. Claude Lucchesi at the ALMA U.S. Conference held at the Adam’s Mark Hotel, St. Louis, October 16-18, 2002. Dr. Lucchesi has had 14 years of management experience with Shell, Sherwin-Williams and Exxon-Mobil Chemical. Since 1968 he has been the Director of the Analytical Services Laboratory (ASL) at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. In 1995, he became an Emeritus Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry and the Consulting Director for the ASL. Dr. Lucchesi was a co-founder of ALMA and served as its first President.
The Award citation read:
“Your selection as the recipient of the award was virtually unanimous. Your outstanding contributions to Analytical Laboratory Management over the years including serving as the co-founder of both ULMA and ALMA, creating and editing the MML Journal, presenting the most successful short course in the world on Analytical Laboratory Management, and the role that you continue to play as a mentor and role model to lab managers worldwide make you the obvious choice as the first recipient of this award.”
Acceptance Address
Dr. Lucchesi outlined the history of ALMA in the acceptance address he delivered at the award presentation ceremony.
Distinquished Service Award Acceptance Talk
Claude A. Lucchesi
Department of Chemistry
Northwestern University
18 October 2002
Introduction
It is an honor and a joy to receive the first ALMA Distinguished Service Award in Analytical Laboratory Management. The recognition from my friends and colleagues is a great feeling. I have many of you to thank. I want to thank my colleagues who nominated me, the members of the ALMA Board who selected me, the awards committee which crafted the Award criteria, and all of you who have worked with me and who really share the award with me. Tony Montana deserves special thanks for undertaking the task of shepherding the first nominations through to selection of the first awardee. Brian Howard and ISC deserve our thanks for sustained efforts in helping to find financial support for the award. And of course, we must thank Stu Cram for his support and for the sponsorship of his company Agilent Technologies, Inc.
The citation mentions both ULMA and ALMA. ULMA was our beginning, and seeing ULMA and ALMA in the same sentence prompted the idea that perhaps it is time to start a valid history of our organization. And that is just what I intend to do with this acceptance talk. I hope that later, Tom Lyttle and others will join me in producing a history of ALMA to be ready for publication by our 25th Conference celebration in 2004.
What I will do today, is to point out milestones in our history and to refer to publications that chronicle our progress.
First Conference
As many of you know, ULMA (University Laboratory Managers Association) came into being as a result of the establishment of analytical instrumentation laboratories in our research universities. The labs were funded primarily by NSF, NIH, and DOE. In fact, I came to Northwestern University in 1968 to establish such a laboratory. The rationale for the laboratories was simple: chemical research almost always means measurements, cutting-edge research generally requires costly instruments, and the research groups in a chemistry department cannot afford to have one each of every needed piece of equipment. Thus, necessity dictated the centralization AND……..AND, the management of research-grade instrumentation
The idea for ULMA arose at NU in the fall of 1979 during a users’ training course given by JEOL. We had purchased three NMRs from JEOL, and JEOL asked to have a training course for the Midwest at NU. Tom Lyttle was participating in this training course.
Let me paraphrase from a 1981 American Laboratory editorial that describes the training course. I think it is appropriate at this point to indicate how supportive Brian Howard and Bill Wham of ISC have been to ALMA since our very beginning.
Tom Lyttle was one of the 14 or so of the participants at the hands-on training course. During a break he started to look around the lab. He was especially interested in a number of instrument modifications and lab systems we had at NU. He observed things that only a lab manager would notice. This led to an exchange of ideas. Soon Rudy Haidle (who would become the our first secretary-treasurer) joined the conversation, and the result was that we decided to organize a conference for lab managers and senior staff with the purpose of discussing common problems and possible solutions. Thus, the first conference was held in October 1980 on a Thursday afternoon and a Friday morning. I chaired the first session on “Laboratory Organization and Operation.” Tom chaired the second session on “Funding Mechanisms.”
We envisioned the conference as a Midwest regional meeting when we decided to meet one afternoon and the following morning. With this schedule, conferees could drive to NU on Thursday morning and return home on Friday afternoon. We never dreamed that 64 persons from all over the US would show up. We had 45 scientists from 30 universities, 17 scientists from industrial companies, and two from government labs. Both the East Coast (Harvard, Yale, and MIT) and the West Coast (Stanford and UCLA) were represented. The conferees came from 22 states and Canada.
We had an extremely high level of attendee participation, and it was decided to formalize an organization to perpetuate the Conference and to publish a Newsletter to facilitate communication between conferences.
You may be interested in two of the topics that appeared in the first Newsletter: (1) Power lines as a noise source, and (2) Recovery of Silver from Silver Chloride. In those days we were still interested in Chemistry. Bill Baitinger of Purdue was the Newsletter Editor and he received seven Letters-to-the Editor. Many of these letters had to do with suggestions for our second Conference. I am sure that John Coulter and Dave Green would be excited to receive that many letters-to-the-editor these days. The Newsletter later became our ALMA Bulletin.
Many of the papers presented at the first Conference were published in American Laboratory. C&E News reported on the Conference, and a symposium on lab management was scheduled for the ACS Division of Professional Relations.
At the first Conference, a set of organizational goals was formulated, and a second conference was scheduled for the next year at Tom Lyttle’s lab at Iowa State. At Iowa State, we set an attendance record that we have yet to break. At that conference the vendors and others asked to join ULMA, and we soon became ALMA to include industry and government. For the first 15 years or so of ALMA we rotated the sites of our conferences from academe to government to industry. As you know, now about 90% of our members are from industry, and we have stopped rotating our conferences.
Executive Director
A milestone occurred at our 7th Conference in 1986. By this time, we had built enough of a financial surplus to afford an executive director, and we hired Dr. Robert Stalzer, a recently retired lab manager from DuPont, for the position. At this time we decided we had to start an annual dues of $20. Up until this time we were able to run the Conferences and the Bulletin through the Conference registration fee.
In 1992, we asked Judith Sjoberg and her Professional Association Management firm to take on the administrative tasks in running ALMA. Miquela Ortiz is now our Association manager, and we are grateful to Miquela for the job she is doing for us.
International Attention
By 1987, ALMA attracted international attention. The Chinese sent a delegation to our Detroit Conference to propose a formal exchange of lab managers to study how each of us managed our laboratories. The World Bank had loaned China 100 million dollars to build Analysis and Test Centers at 26 key universities in China, and I believe the Chinese contacted ALMA as a way to demonstrate to the World Bank that they were managing their laboratories in a credible manner.
In the fall of 1988, Chinese managers from five Analysis and Test Centers attended our Conference at Oak Ridge National Laboratories. Tom Lyttle and I served as hosts. We took them on a tour of the NIST Laboratories in Maryland and spent a symphonic evening with them at the Kennedy Center in Washington. The ALMA part of the exchange program was supported by the ALMA International Exchange Program which was funded by eight US instrument companies: Hewlett-Packard, Finnigan, Varian, and GE-NMR instruments on the West Coast and Bruker, VG Instruments, Bio-Rad/ Digilab and Millipore/Waters on the East Coast. Each company donated $1000 to the fund for each visit of the Chinese delegation. The delegation would arrive in San Francisco where a Finnigan person would serve as host, and arrange for the Chinese to visit the four West Coast vendors. From San Francisco, the delegates would attend the ALMA Conference, and after the Conference, Tom and I would take them on a site-seeing tour of the area around the Conference. Then, the delegation went to Boston where Bruker served as host.
Tom and I became the ALMA delegation to China. We visited 13 Analysis and Test Centers in 11 Chinese cities. As a result of this formal contact, China started the Chinese ALMA which still exists. In fact, about four years ago, one of our Chinese colleagues visited with me at Northwestern.
Polar Programs
Another item worthy of mention in an ALMA history is our participation in the NSF Polar Program Project. We were asked to help in the design of the Science, Engineering, and Technology Center in McMurdo Bay in Antarctica. Tom Lyttle and I spent two days in Washington consulting with the principal investigators who were going to work in the new facility. We made a number of staff and design recommendations.
Workshops
Another significant point in the development of ALMA occurred in 1990 when we became involved in the direct education and training of new lab managers. Bob Stalzer, Cynthia Salisbury and I presented WSs at the NIST Conference in Washington that year. Bob’s was on “Laboratory Occupational Safety and Health Standards,” Cynthia’s was on “Laboratory Waste Management,” and mine was on “Managing the Chemical Analysis Support Laboratory.” Later Tony Montana prepared a WS on “Quality and Teamwork in the Analytical Laboratory.” Recently, Wayne Collins developed an “advanced course on lab management entitled “Building World Class Lab Practices” to follow my WS. Tony and I also give our WSs for ACS and for Pittcon. My workshop and ALMA have given me the wonderful opportunity to visit many places, including China, India, Australia, South America, South Africa, Senegal in French West Africa, as well as Europe. This June, I gave my WS in conjunction with our third EuroALMA Conference in Berlin.
I am grateful to ALMA for these opportunities and for the friendships and for the affection that we share.
Managing The Modern Laboratory
In 1995, ALMA reached a very important milestone. Brian Howard persuaded us to sponsor a peer-reviewed journal on Laboratory Management. We decided to call it Managing the Modern Laboratory. The following comes from the first editorial:
“The objective of MML is to publish peer-reviewed articles on current, successful management practices. The purpose is to provide managers and other laboratory professionals with an efficacious mix of technical and executive information to help meet the relentless demand for improvement in productivity, responsiveness, and cost-effectiveness. We believe that MML is an idea whose time has come.”
The journal is now in its 6th volume and is in the capable hands of Dave Green as editor and Wayne Collins as associate editor. The journal is published by ISC and is abstracted by ACS’s Chemical Abstracts. The journal is now included in the ALMA dues. I want to take this opportunity to thank Thermo for the annual financial support of our journal.
EuroALMA
I mentioned EuroALMA. In 1998, under the leadership of Tom Lyttle and Karina Langseth-Manrique, we had our first EuroALMA Conference in Norway. The conference was so successful that a second one was held in the Netherlands in 2000 (with Alexander Debbets as the general chairman). This year we had the Berlin Conference. Future EuroALMA Conferences will be planned with the guidance of Karina and Alexander. Tom Lyttle will serve as general advisor.
E-News and Local Sections
I think that ALMA hit another milestone with the monthly electronic publication of Wayne Collins’s E-News. I certainly agree with Wayne that the E-News helps to fill the need to serve members who cannot attend our annual Conferences.
The same need is filled by the new Local Sections being established under the leadership of John Sadowski this year. Sucessful Sections are now in Houston, Ohio/Indiana and Eastern PA/NJ/DE. John tells me there is potential for additional sections in Illinois, Southern California, and NY/Connecticut.
Other Items
Web Site and Trademark date is 2001.
Endowment Fund
I think we have a wonderful history of achievement. There is one area, though, that I believe we can greatly improve. That is the growth of our endowment fund. We have had requests from developing countries in Africa for financial help to attend our conferences. EuroALMA also has had requests for funds from Eastern Europe. Unique requests have come from Kenya and Tanzania for support of Lab Management conferences to be held in November (next month). South Africa and Kenya have asked for help and advice for lab management courses they are adding to their Chemistry curriculum. It would have been very satisfying to help these groups.
ALMA and the Future
Let’s take a look at what might be in ALMA’s future. We hear prognostications about more and better tools to carry out more and more difficult and sophisticated measurements. At the same time we hear about more “user friendly” instruments and more and more about automation, computerization, robotics and bandwidth.
But we do not hear about is how these developments are going to get answers at a bearable cost. We do not hear about how these options will be managed! As analytical options increase, good management becomes more critical. The study and communication of how to manage these options is what ALMA is all about. We are filling this expanding need in a scholarly and vigorous way by helping managers achieve technical and executive excellence. According to a University of Chicago administrator, we are a new field of endeavor.
Conclusion
To conclude, let me quote from Dr. Brian Howard’s editorial in this year’s May issue of American Laboratory:
“The world of sciences is intensely competitive. Academe, for example, is certainly not the contemplative environment it used to be. Competition for funding or for investing is like a bullwhip for laboratory managers. Today, the enterprise, which may be the upper echelons of a drug company or the university administration, wants a laboratory that is run like a business—and a successful business no less. ALMA anticipated the future when it was organized to focus on improving the management and productivity of the nation’s laboratories.”
I know that all of us look forward to an exciting and fulfilling future for ALMA.
Thank you.