 |
|
|
EDITORIAIS
Professor Oswaldo Sala Homage This special issue of the Journal of the Brazilian Chemical Society contains fourteen articles from the contributions presented at the workshop "Modern Aspects of Vibrational Spectroscopy", held at the Institute of Chemistry of the University of Sao Paulo, from July, 8 to 11, 1996. The objective of the workshop was, on the one hand, to gather specialists from several fields of Vibrational Spectroscopy to make available to a large audience a perspective on the state of the art and on future developments. On the other hand, the workshop was organized to honor to Professor Oswaldo Sala on the occasion of his retirement and 70th birthday. Professor Sala's contributions to the establishment and development of Vibrational Spectroscopy, and particularly, of Raman Spectroscopy in Brazil, are out-standing by any standards. As a former collaborator of the late Professor Häns Stammreich, together with Roberto Forneris, Yara Tavares, Darwin Bassi, and Geraldo Ayrosa, he had a decisive role in the pioneering work on long wavelength excitation in Raman Spectroscopy1, which anticipated by several decades one of the modern trends in Raman Spectroscopy, and which placed Prof. Stammreich's group at the forefront of the technique. After Prof. Stammreich's death in 1969, Prof. Sala became responsible for the laboratory, and in a very short time he was able to update the equipment. In the early 1970's the first Raman laser spectrometer in Latin America was operating in the laboratory, and a substantial number of students were under Prof. Sala's supervision. Since then, continuous updating and upgrading of the equipment has been necessary to keep pace with developments in Vibrational Spectroscopy - always with his explicit or implicit involvement. Several of his former students are now researchers at universities around the country, and all of them have a deep respect for and recognition of Prof. Sala for his decisive contributions in firmly establishing Vibrational Spectroscopy in Brazil. The workshop on "Modern Aspects of Vibrational Spectroscopy" was accordingly an homage from former students, collaborators, and the Vibrational Spectroscopy community at large, to his extreme dedication, competence, and last but not least, his outstanding humaneness. Therefore, this special issue of JBCS represents the Brazilian Chemical Society's recognition of Professor Oswaldo Sala's contributions to the advancement of science in Brazil, especially in the field of Vibrational Spectroscopy. 1H. Stammreich: The Raman spectrum of Bromine; Phys. Rev., 1950, pp. 78 |
||||||||||||||||||||||
