Ramon M. Barnes, Ph.D. is director of the University Research Institute for Analytical Chemistry, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts, editor/publisher of the ICP Information Newsletter (1975- ), and chairman of the Winter Conference on Plasma Spectrochemistry (1980- ). He received a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was a Materials Engineer at the NASA Lewis Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio, and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the DOE Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University.

From 1969 to 2000 he taught analytical chemistry and maintained an international research program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In 2000 he became professor emeritus. He has published more than 300 papers, edited four books, and continues an active research interest in fundamentals and applications of inductively coupled plasma (ICP) discharges for spectrochemical analysis. The University Research Institute for Analytical Chemistry (URIAC) is the research and development division of ICP Information Newsletter, Inc., a not for profit corporation established in 1997 to foster science education, research, and study in spectroanalytical chemistry.