Nicholas Spencer Receives STLE International Award
The STLE International Award is the highest technical honor of the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers (USA) and bestows lifetime honorary membership on the recipient. It is given in recognition of the recipient's outstanding contributions in tribology, lubrication engineering or allied fields. The award will be presented at the STLE Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida in May.
Nicholas D. Spencer is Emeritus Professor of Surface Science and Technology at ETH Zurich. He obtained his bachelor's and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Cambridge, before working as a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley. After a decade in the US chemical industry, he joined ETH Zurich in 1993, where he has served as both the head of the Department of Materials and the President of the Research Commission. He is co-founder of Swiss Tribology and the founder and Chair of the International Tribology Forum. He is also co-founding Editor and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Tribology Letters. He is a member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences, a fellow of both the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK) and the Society for Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers, and was the winner of the 2018 Tribology Gold Medal. He has published over 450 papers in academic journals, edited several monographs, and holds over a dozen patents. His main research areas are tribochemistry, surface functionalization, surface analysis and biointerfaces.