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The Society for Applied Spectroscopy Logo 2026

The Peter Griffiths Award, named for the legendary infrared spectroscopist, recognizes the best paper published annually in Applied Spectroscopy Practica. Its inaugural recipients, Sara Fraser-Miller and coauthors, will be honored at SciX 2026, and the journal is now accepting 2026 submissions for the third award.

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 (1)

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.

Artist’s conception of a futuristic laser-based instrument ©  MD AL AMIN-chronicles-stock.adobe.com

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.

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.

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.