Jerome Workman, Jr.

At SciX 2026, Alessandro De Giacomo explains why laser–matter interaction deserves more attention and how nanoparticle size forces a trade-off between sensitivity and practical tagging.

At SciX 2026, Thursday morning’s “New Challenges in Chemometrics” session questioned long-held assumptions, from reliance on autonomous model selection to the restriction of spectral data to real numbers.

The inaugural Peter Griffiths Award winner discusses deep low-frequency Raman measurements through wax and what remains before clinical breast-imaging use.

The 2026 Lester W. Strock Award recipient discusses how single-particle ICP-MS can distinguish engineered and natural nanoparticles and track metalloid pollution downwind of industrial sites.

The recipient of the ACS Award in Spectrochemical Analysis discusses how surface-enhanced Raman scattering became a practical diagnostic readout and how close it is to clinical use.

A candid plenary on the incentives shaping academic science was followed by an afternoon of talks spanning flowing SERS detection, historical textiles, maple syrup, pathogen immunoassays, and electrochemical Raman microscopy.

The 2026 AES Mid-Career Award recipient explains how molecular-scale simulations of polyelectrolyte brush-grafted nanochannels are revealing unexpected flow behavior.

The 2026 Ellis R. Lippincott Award recipient discusses the barriers to clinical adoption of photonic diagnostics and his vision for personalized optical digital twins.

The University of Utah researcher discusses surface-area-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, lipid membrane studies, and his move into PFAS testing.

Honored with a dedicated Spectrochimica Acta Part B award session at SciX 2026, De Giacomo explains why larger nanoparticles produce stronger LIBS signals and what that means for sensing design.

Wednesday's program at SciX 2026 kept returning to one question: can spectroscopy perform outside the controlled laboratory? Speakers took surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), mid-infrared photonics, chemometrics, and fluorescence excitation–emission matrix (EEM) spectroscopy into clinics, food plants, reactor coolant loops, brine fields, and drinking water supplies.

Near-infrared spectroscopy has quietly stopped being a niche calibration exercise and started acting like an autonomous diagnostic partner, reading consciousness in an injured brain, steering a fermenter without a human hand, and hunting invisible plastic in a glass of water. The tool chemists once used to check moisture in grain is now fusing with artificial intelligence to make decisions no spectrometer could make alone.

Eight FACSS award winners at SciX 2026, One LIBS trailblazer. Forty-eight questions. And not one of them is a softball. Award season in spectroscopy usually means polite applause, a plaque, and a photo. We're not completely interested only in the award sessions. The eight scientists honored at SciX 2026 in Sparks, Nevada, along with LIBS researcher Alessandro De Giacomo, are pushing Raman into operating rooms, flying LIBS on drones, reading chemistry off Mars, and tracing toxic metals downwind of industrial sites. Their work makes big claims. In the coming days, Spectroscopy will sit down with eight of these researchers and ask whether those claims hold up. The interviews that follow won't just celebrate. They'll press on the gaps between simulation and experiment, between the lab bench and the clinic, and between a clever paper and an instrument someone will actually buy and use.

Fourier-transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy, long the workhorse of molecular fingerprinting, is being reinvented by photothermal detection schemes and quantum cascade laser (QCL) sources that push spatial resolution and analysis speed far beyond classical dispersive and interferometric limits. New instrumentation such as optical photothermal infrared (O-PTIR) microscopy and laser direct infrared (LDIR) chemical imaging is enabling sub-micron, label-free chemical mapping of biological, environmental, and pharmaceutical samples. This article reviews the latest FT-IR-adjacent technologies, recent patents, and research driving the field, featuring perspectives from the scientists and instrument developers advancing the technique.

FT-IR spectroscopy, long treated as a mature bench technique for confirming a carbonyl stretch or fingerprinting a polymer, has quietly become one of chemistry’s most versatile discovery engines: it now infers molecular structure straight from a spectrum without a reference library, resolves chemistry tens of nanometers wide, and screens a fingerstick of blood for disease in minutes. The last five years of published research show FT-IR moving from a confirmatory tool into a predictive, autonomous, and field-ready analytical platform.

Raman spectroscopy is entering one of its most consequential periods since its commercialization, driven by artificial intelligence, coherent heterodyne detection, and radical instrument miniaturization, with new deep-learning frameworks and portable systems moving Raman analysis into fields, factories, and crime scenes.

Raman spectroscopy just got a brain, a stopwatch, and a nose. Together, these upgrades are turning a century-old light-scattering trick into a frontline tool for catching cancer earlier, chiral drugs cleaner, and toxic chemicals faster than ever before.

The following articles are the most accessed digital object identifier (DOI) manuscripts for Spectroscopy and LCGC International during the month of August 2026. Ten articles are individually ranked here by DOI page views.

This interactive e-book celebrates National Forensic Science Week by highlighting the vital role of spectroscopy in modern criminal investigations and emphasizing how technological innovation is making forensic analysis faster, safer, and more reliable for courtroom testimony.

The bulky bench-top NIR spectrometer is quietly being dismantled and rebuilt as a wafer-scale photonic chip, a self-calibrating algorithm, and a sensor small enough to ride in a shirt pocket. What once demanded a grating, a moving mirror, and a climate-controlled lab now fits inside a handheld module, a bioreactor probe, or a drone payload, and it increasingly figures out what it is looking at on its own.

Jay P. Kitt, a University of Utah research assistant professor who has spent a decade extending confocal Raman microscopy from phospholipid membranes to nucleic acids and peptide-membrane interactions, is the recipient of Spectroscopy's 2026 Emerging Leader in Molecular Spectroscopy Award.

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.

Peter R. Griffiths, a pioneering figure in Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy who authored or coauthored more than 300 scientific papers and numerous books over five decades, died August 29, 2026, at age 84. This tribute traces his career from Oxford and Digilab through Ohio University and the University of Idaho, his landmark books and the Handbook of Vibrational Spectroscopy, and his many honors, including the 2023 Ellis R. Lippincott Award and 2024 Optica Fellowship.

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.