Waterloo graduate student earns Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal

The University of Waterloo is proud to announce that one of its former Department of Chemistry students, German Augusto Gómez-Rios, will receive one of Canada’s most prestigious academic awards at Spring convocation: the Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal.

Created in 1873 by Canada’s third Governor General Lord Dufferin, the Governor General’s Academic Medal is an award given out annually to students from different institutions who achieve the highest level of academic scholarship for their cohort at their institution. The award is divided into four categories ranging from bronze at the secondary school level to gold at the graduate level. German Augusto Gómez-Rios, now a postdoctoral fellow in the department of Chemistry and part of the Pawliszyn Research Group, specializes in developing and improving analytical technologies for rapid analysis of a variety of organic substances.

Already an author on more than 30 peer-reviewed journals articles, Gómez-Rios has succeeded in improving a number of methods related to solid phase micro-extraction (SPME), an analytical method developed by Janusz Pawliszyn in the 1990s that uses a solid coating to selectively extract small molecules. For example, he streamlined analytical protocols that will allow doctors and surgeons in the near future to provide individualized patient treatment, and he has succeeded in reducing the time it takes to screen for prohibited substances and drug abuse from 30 minutes to just 10 seconds.