The RCM Beynon Prize 2011 has been awarded to Antonino Licciardello, University of Catania, Italy.

The prize was established in 2004 to mark the 80th birthday of John Beynon, the founding Editor of Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry (RCM). The prize is awarded annually to the corresponding author or authors of a paper that describes an innovative advance in mass spectrometric instrumentation or methodology that has had the greatest immediate impact in its particular sub-discipline. The paper must have been published in RCM in the previous two calendar years and is chosen by an ad hoc sub-committee of the Editorial Board of RCM. The prize is awarded by John Wiley and Sons and comprises a monetary award of US$ 1000 and a certificate for each contributing author.

Antonino Licciardello and co-authors, Nunzio Tuccitto, Lara Lobo, Agnes Tempez, Ivan Delfanti, Patrick Chapon, Stela Canulescu, Nerea Bordel, and Johann Michler, receive the award for the Best Paper published in 2009–10. In their paper, the team described the use of pulsed radiofrequency glow discharge time-of-flight mass spectrometry to profile thin films of different polymers and to discriminate among layers of multilayered films having similar elemental composition but different polymer structure.

• Pulsed radiofrequency glow discharge time-of-flight mass spectrometry for molecular depth profiling of polymer-based films
  N. Tuccitto, L. Lobo, A. Tempez, I. Delfanti, P. Chapon, S. Canulescu, N. Bordel, J. Michler, A. Licciardello,
  Rapid Commun. Mass Spectrom. 2009, 23(5), 549–556.
  DOI: 10.1002/rcm.3906

This paper is free to view until the end of 2011.