Purnendu Dasgupta is presently Hamish Small Chair of Ion Analysis in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and an adjunct Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Texas at Arlington. A native of India, he received his BSc degree from Bankura Christian College (an institution established by Wesleyan missionaries in 1903) in 1968 with honors in Chemistry and MSc degree in Inorganic Chemistry from the University of Burdwan in 1970, both in West Bengal, India. After a brief stint in research on anomalous electrochemistry at the Indian Institution for Cultivation of Science (where Raman once carried out his celebrate studies), he came to the United States in 1973 at the age of 22. He received his PhD in Analytical Chemistry under Professor Philip W West in 1977 from Louisiana State University, with a minor in Electrical Engineering. Thereafter he was briefly at LSU as an instructor and until mid-1981 at the California Primate Research Center as Aerosol Research Chemist and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California-Davis. He next joined Texas Tech University and remained there for the next 25 years, rising to the rank of Paul Whitfield Horn Professor, the highest honor at that institution. He moved to the University of Texas at Arlington in 2007.

Sandy did not quite realize his original ambitions of making a living as a poet. His salvation has been in his lab and his students; counting PhD students, postdoctoral fellows and visiting scientists, he has worked with more than 200, publishing in the process more than 400 papers (>150 of these in the flagship journal of the discipline, Analytical Chemistry), and 26 patents that have now been cited ~15000 times, earning him a H-index of 62. He took the lead in revising the current edition of Christian’s undergraduate text Analytical Chemistry that now includes his name.

His recognition includes the Benedetti-Pichler Award of the American Microchemical Society (1989), ACS Award in Chromatography (2011), Dal Nogare Award in Chromatography (2012) and the J Calvin Giddings Award in Chemical Education (2015). In 2015, he was also elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and an honorary member of the Japan Society of Analytical Chemistry.