UA SRP, Research Specialist, Mike Kopplin, receives Staff Award

On May 7th, Mike Kopplin was the recipient of the University of Arizona, College of Pharmacy, 2010 Staff Award for Excellence.  Mike has worked for the UA for 25 years.   He does an exceptional job for both the College and our Superfund Program.

Mike has a number of duties.  He oversees the analytical core for our Superfund Research Program performing up to 14,000 analyses per year for Superfund researchers and other collaborators across the campus and nation.  These analyses are the backbone of numerous investigations and are incorporated into a multitude of presentations and publications.  He receives the samples (environmental and biological), processes the samples, performs the IPC mass spectrometer analyses, and then reduces all the information into a simple data sheet for each investigator.  As a result of his diligence, Mike is often included as an author on publications and is always acknowledged in presentations.  Thanks to Mike, our analytical core never shuts down.  Mike has the instrument running samples every hour of every day.  On the rare occasion when Mike takes a day off, he can be seen coming into the building to check the autosampler to be sure the samples are being processed.

Mike has been a significant part of the competitive and noncompetitive renewals for our Superfund Program.  Mike “pulls together” the final documents, making sure all guidelines have been followed, proofing every figure/table, verifying type size, page limits, etc.  It is a critical task in order to assure the renewals are in the correct and acceptable format prior to submission.

Mike is also the Information Technology guru for our Superfund as well as our US-Mexico Binational Center.  Both Programs have extensive websites which he oversees.

Please join us in congratulating Mike on this well-deserved award.