The Gerald S. Birth Award for outstanding innovation in diffuse reflection or diffuse transmission spectroscopy is conferred and sponsored by the Council for Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (CNIRS) in memory of Gerald Birth. The late Dr. Birth was the founder of the International Diffuse Reflectance Conference (IDRC), also sponsored by the CNIRS. He made many contributions to the instrument technology related to diffuse reflectance.
Christian Huck obtained his doctorate in chemistry in 1998 from the University in Innsbruck, Austria. He is currently a full professor at the University of Innsbruck, vice-head of the Institute of Analytical Chemistry and Radiochemistry and head of the spectroscopy unit.
From 2014 until 2017 Christian Huck worked as a visiting scientist with Professor Yukihiro Ozaki at Kwansei-Gakuin University (Sanda, Hyogo, Japan). Christian is editor-in-chief for Spectrochimica Acta A (Elsevier) and NIR news (Sage), associate editor for Journal of Near Infrared Spectroscopy (JNIRS, Sage) and several others known journals in the broader field of analytical chemistry. In 2023 he will be chair to host the ICNIRS 2023 international conference and is the current vice-president of the Austrian Chemical Society. During the last 15 years Christian received about 15 international awards including Tomas Hirschfeld. Christian has published more than 300 peer-reviewed manuscripts resulting in an h-index of 58 based on more than 12900 citations.