Jerome Workman, Jr.

John Philip Walters, Ph.D. (1938-2026), was an analytical chemist who spent 17 years researching the physics of spark-discharge emission spectroscopy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before moving to St. Olaf College in 1982, where he became best known for pioneering a role-playing undergraduate laboratory model that had students take on professional roles to mirror real analytical-chemistry work. His 1991 three-part series on the approach in Analytical Chemistry earned him the ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry's J. Calvin Giddings Award in 1993, and he continued extending his understand-the-system teaching philosophy into computer-controlled instrumentation well into his later career.

Raman spectroscopy is shedding its bulky, benchtop reputation as chip-scale spectrometers, tip-enhanced probes, and AI-native detectors push the technique into pockets, production lines, and single molecules. The result is an instrument category being rebuilt from the optics up, faster, smaller, deeper, and smarter than the Raman systems of even five years ago.

A history of the James L. Waters Symposium at Pittcon, from its 1987 origins and its founder, instrument entrepreneur James Logan Waters, through thirty-six installments of speakers spanning gas chromatography to generative AI.

A new laser-based spectroscopic method, developed by researchers at the University of Gothenburg and an EU-funded collaboration, has produced the first high-resolution nuclear-shape measurements of the radioactive actinides fermium and neptunium.

Atomic spectroscopy has quietly moved past splitting light and counting ions toward instruments that track a single nanoparticle, fuse a laser pulse with an isotope-ratio mass spectrometer, and correct their own interferences with artificial intelligence in real time. The result is a new class of ICP-MS, LIBS, and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) platforms that are turning what used to be a benchtop-only science into field-ready, self-optimizing analytical intelligence.

This is Chemometrics in Spectroscopy Column Number 251. In Column Number 250, we left you with a puzzle. We had just shown that a little-known piece of two-hundred-year-old mathematics, Lagrange's method of undetermined multipliers, could force an MLR calibration to ignore one particular, carefully chosen direction of repack-induced spectral change. It worked, but it only handled one direction at a time, and we admitted we had no idea whether the trick could be extended to PCR or PLS. That bothered us. So in this installment we go looking for the more general version of the idea, and we find it sitting in some very good recent work by Neal Gallagher and Nathanial Watson on what they call clutter suppression (a framework built for a completely different problem, target detection in hyperspectral imaging, that turns out to fit ours almost perfectly). Put the two together and you get an algorithm that whitens the calibration spectra with a clutter covariance matrix estimated from repack replicates, then hands the whitened data to the same Lagrangian machine we built last time. The payoff: the correction now generalizes to several, non-proportional directions of diffuse-reflection variability at once, and, because it is just a preprocessing step, it works ahead of PLS and PCR as well as MLR, which finally answers the question we could not answer before. This approach may very well be an answer to repack variation in repeated solid or slurry sample measurements using diffuse reflection. In this column we change gears with our writing tone and format by taking a "chemometry" approach, rather than a strict tutorial one. In future columns we hope to "unpack" this information in our more typical extended and tutorial manner. Let's explore solving this repack variation problem together.

Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, a technique built on a scanning mirror invented before the moon landing, is quietly being rebuilt from the ground up. Light combs, photothermal probes, and chip-scale photonics are pushing infrared analysis past resolution and speed limits that stood for six decades.

This interactive e-book covers the recent trends and developments in analytical spectroscopy and how it is being used in archaeology and cultural heritage analysis.

The following articles are the most accessed digital object identifier (DOI) manuscripts for Spectroscopy and LCGC International during the month of July 2026. Nine articles are ranked here by DOI page views; a tenth entry in the July report (135 views) was recorded against the bare journal-level DOI rather than an individual article and is therefore not attributable to a single manuscript.

For 170 years, spectroscopists have built quantitative analysis on only one number pulled from every spectrum they ever recorded, discarding its inseparable twin. New dispersion-theory and complex-valued chemometric methods recover that missing half, the refractive index, and in favorable systems cut calibration error by as much as an order of magnitude.

Nearly every diabetic on earth still stabs a finger to measure their blood sugar, but a small army of lasers, infrared beams, and machine-learning algorithms is quietly plotting to end that ritual for good. This review tracks the photons chasing glucose through skin, from near-infrared reflectance to Raman fingerprints, and asks why the “needle-free” promise keeps slipping just out of reach.

HORIBA has launched Partica, a laser diffraction and dynamic image analysis particle size and shape analyzer for advanced materials research and quality control.

Spectrometers that once filled an entire lab bench now fit in a coat pocket, and they are quietly reshaping how fentanyl gets identified on a roadside, how counterfeit cashmere gets caught on a loading dock, and how a five-hundred-year-old painting gets authenticated without ever leaving the wall. This review tracks five years of coverage from Spectroscopy alongside the broader literature to show how handheld Raman, FT-IR, NIR, and XRF instruments moved from laboratory novelty to field necessity.

A plain-language glossary of 40 spectroscopic and elemental analytical methods—FTIR, Raman, ICP-MS, XRF, atomic absorption, and more—with verified references for lab professionals, students, and instrument buyers.

Ramon M. Barnes, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at UMass Amherst and a pioneering figure in ICP spectrochemistry, has died at 86. He founded the Winter Conference on Plasma Spectrochemistry and edited the ICP Information Newsletter for decades.

A rule proposed by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) would give political appointees final authority over discretionary grant decisions ahead of peer reviewers, allow agencies to terminate active grants without a formal right of appeal, and restrict international collaboration and publication funding across federal science agencies. For the optical, molecular, vibrational, and atomic spectroscopy community, the proposal could affect the grants, journal support, and student and postdoctoral positions that sustain the field.

A review of selected X-ray analysis work published on Spectroscopy Online from 2022–2026.

This review highlights major advances in infrared (IR) and near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy from 2022–2026, including instrument miniaturization, hyperspectral imaging, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. These developments are expanding the use of vibrational spectroscopy beyond the laboratory into portable and field-deployable analytical systems. Environmental applications such as microplastic detection, biosolids analysis, soil characterization, and contaminant monitoring are emerging as key growth areas.

A comprehensive introduction to LIBs coverage published in Spectroscopy Online from 2022–2025.

The following articles are the 10 most accessed digital object identifier (DOI) manuscripts for Spectroscopy and LCGC International during the month of May 2026.

Today we celebrate World Oceans Day, where we highlight how spectroscopy is helping us advance ocean analysis and preserve this fragile ecosystem.

This feature article traces C. V. Raman’s life, scientific evolution, and foundational contributions to quantum spectroscopy, emphasizing the intellectual path that led to one of the most important discoveries in optical science. Each year his discovery is celebrated as National Science Day (India) on February 28 to honor Sir C.V. Raman's discovery of the Raman Effect.

In their milestone 250th column, Howard Mark and Jerome Workman, Jr. describe a mathematically rigorous algorithm that minimizes or eliminates sampling repack variation in near-infrared spectroscopy. The method separates systematic spectral changes caused by sample rearrangement from true compositional information, enabling more robust calibration models and significantly improving analytical repeatability for powdered and heterogeneous solid samples.

Over the past two years, Spectroscopy magazine has extensively documented and analyzed the growing role of artificial intelligence in spectroscopy through articles, interviews, podcasts, and technical features, highlighting both its hype and its potential as a transformative advancement in data processing and analytical science.

This first installment of Research Profiles in Spectroscopy Series features The University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Petrochronology Research Group and its advances in laser ablation ICP-MS, isotope geochemistry, and petrochronology. Led by John Cottle, Andrew Kylander-Clark, and Morgan Adamson, the group has developed innovative spectroscopic methods that combine high-resolution isotopic dating with trace-element analysis to better understand petrochronology processes, including mountain building, crustal evolution, and complex geological processes.

This new feature in Spectroscopy introduces a structured, application-focused series that curates and examines the most influential research papers in molecular and atomic spectroscopy. Each installment presents a focused “Top 10” collection of seminal publications within a specific analytical domain, spanning techniques such as ultraviolet–visible, infrared, Raman, near-infrared, and atomic spectroscopy. Across biomedical, biopharmaceutical, environmental, and forensic applications, the selected papers illustrate how spectroscopic methods are applied to real-world analytical challenges. Emphasis is placed on the integration of spectral data with chemometric approaches to enable robust calibration, accurate prediction, and meaningful interpretation. Together, these curated collections provide practitioners with a concise, application-oriented perspective on impactful developments in spectroscopy. This article brings together the first nine “Top 10” collections in the series, offering a cross-disciplinary view of influential work shaping the field.

Spectroscopy associate editorial director Jerome Workman Jr. highlights the current trends and ongoing research in space exploration.

The following articles are the 10 most accessed digital object identifier (DOI) manuscripts for Spectroscopy and LCGC International during March, 2026.

Spectroscopy is rapidly evolving into an integrated, intelligent ecosystem where advances in instrumentation, detectors, and optics—combined with chemometrics and artificial intelligence (AI)—are enabling higher sensitivity, miniaturization, multimodal analysis, and real-time decision-making across techniques ranging from ultraviolet–visible (UV–vis), infrared (IR), and Raman to inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), and X-ray fluorescence (XRF). Together, these developments are driving automation, predictive modeling, and the emergence of autonomous analytical laboratories with increasingly connected, cloud-enabled workflows.

Over the past two years, molecular spectroscopy has undergone a marked transformation from a predominantly laboratory-based analytical approach into a field-deployable, data-rich forensic toolkit. This evolution has been driven by three converging trends: (i) advances in vibrational spectroscopic instrumentation (Fourier transform infrared [FT-IR], Raman, and near-infrared [NIR], (ii) the integration of chemometrics and machine learning for extracting actionable information from complex spectra, and (iii) the emergence of portable and miniaturized devices suitable for in situ analysis. The ten papers reviewed here collectively demonstrate how spectroscopy is now addressing some of the most persistent challenges in forensic science—such as time since deposition (TSD), post-mortem interval (PMI), trace evidence discrimination, and rapid drug identification—while maintaining evidentiary integrity through non-destructive analysis. Importantly, these works also reflect a shift toward interpretability, validation, and legal defensibility, which are essential for courtroom acceptance.