Latest Conference

The Infrared and Raman Discussion Group’s 238th meeting on December 21 will feature the IRDG-Coblentz Lecture, two award presentations, and talks spanning clinical Raman, SERS, and ultrafast spectroscopy.

Organized by CPACT, the April 27 to 29 meeting at the Marriott Pittsburgh City Center will bring together scientists, engineers, and vendors across the process industries, with keynotes on PAT, Raman, and NIR applications and an abstract deadline of December 7, 2026.

Garth Simpson of Purdue University outlines plans to survey more ordered molecular assemblies and to apply interface-specific chiral spectroscopy to enzyme reactors, solid-phase synthesis, spin-selective reactions, and, ultimately, a new analytical method.

In this Eastern Analytical Symposium (EAS) interview, Garth Simpson of Purdue University explains how a simple geometric effect at interfaces produced a 4.5-degree rotation in fluorescence emission from a naproxen monolayer.

A Q&A interview from SciX explored a porous-particle Raman platform became an alternative to SERS, and why AI could unlock biochemical meaning in vibrational spectra.

Jürgen Popp, winner of this year’s Ellis R. Lippincott Award, discusses the regulatory, cost, and workflow hurdles of moving Raman spectroscopy into hospitals.

A recent conversation with Kevin Wilkinson, a professor of environmental chemistry at the Université de Montréal, sheds light on why no single signature can separate engineered nanoparticles from natural ones.

How do ions and water interact at the atomic level in nanochannels grafted with polymer brushes using all-atom molecular dynamics simulations? Siddhartha Das of the University of Maryland and his team are working on answering this question.

Mammograms can find breast microcalcifications but can’t tell whether they are likely benign or malignant.

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is being used in numerous application areas, including environmental monitoring, cultural heritage, and space exploration.

At SciX, Kevin Wilkinson of the Universite de Montreal explains how faster data acquisition and new software have cut analysis time and how a particle’s chemical composition can link arsenic-bearing emissions back to a copper refinery’s processes.

Marc Porter describes how his group’s surface science work led to SERS-based immunoassays, why reproducibility and pre-analytics decide whether a test reaches the clinic, and the questions he still wants to answer.

In an interview at SciX, Alessandro De Giacomo discusses nanoparticles as signal enhancers and medical tags, a self-calibrating drone LIBS system, open questions in laser–matter interaction, and why students need a strong foundation in fundamentals.

The New York / New Jersey Section of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy will present its 2026 Gold Medal Award to Richard Crocombe at the Eastern Analytical Symposium on November 17, recognizing two decades of work that helped carry spectroscopy out of the laboratory and into the field.

In this Q&A article, we highlight several prominent researchers being recognized at the 2026 SciX Conference for their significant contributions to spectroscopy and photonics and discuss what these researchers talked about at the conference.

Amy Colleran, a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Centre of Metabolomics Research at the University of Liverpool, is exploring how to detect volatile organic compounds by bubbling them directly into colloidal silver and gold nanoparticles.

The Eastern Analytical Symposium returns to Plainsboro, New Jersey, November 16–18, with a keynote on AI-ready data and a posthumous award honoring solid-state NMR researcher Robert Schurko.

In this segment of our SciX interview with Kevin Wilkinson, a professor of environmental chemistry at the Université de Montréal, discusses extending lead isotope work to greater distances and explains why graduate students need adaptability, critical judgment, and coding skills more than expertise in any single instrument.

At SciX, Jay Kitt discusses a project applying Raman spectroscopy to PFAS analysis, the mentoring role he found after leaving traditional academia, and why machine learning could unlock the biochemical information in vibrational spectra.

Top articles include a new "Spectral Frontiers" column and post-conference coverage of the 2026 SciX show in Sparks, Nevada.

In this interview segment from SciX, Juergen Popp explains why molecular “twins” built from optical measurements could reach patients within a decade, provided the field builds the regulatory, computing, and standards ecosystem around the technology.

Siddhartha Das explains how machine learning helps his group sift through roughly a trillion simulation data points. It reveals water and electroosmotic flow behavior and could speed the design of sensor-like channels.

In his SciX interview, Marc Porter discusses what happens to hydrogen when thiols bind to gold, how close analytical chemists can get to detecting a single molecule in a liter, and his new PFAS-focused startup.

At SciX, Alessandro De Giacomo explained how airborne LIBS can produce quantitative results. Instead of relying on reference measurements, the method draws calibration directly from the measured signal, which sidesteps the drone’s positioning and motion problems.

At SciX, Jürgen Popp explains how miniaturized optical spectroscopy could add molecular data to wearable health tracking, which could enable earlier disease detection and a shift toward prevention.

At SciX, Jay Kitt describes the experiment he ran on his own that launched his cytochrome c research, and explains why putting a number on peptide–lipid interactions matters.

Jürgen Popp explains how head and neck surgeons in Jena use a Raman probe to locate tumor borders, why the technique could replace frozen section biopsies, and why optical tools must adapt to clinical workflows rather than the other way around.

At SciX, Marc Porter explains how a Thanksgiving batting lesson led him to compare a bat meeting a ball to light scattering off a molecule, and how his group is using simulations to test whether the analogy holds.