Raman Spectroscopy

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.

A recent roundtable discussion with the SpecAcademy instructors explored why spectroscopy expertise has eroded and how SpecAcademy aims to rebuild it.

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.

At the upcoming 2026 SciX Conference, Ji-Xin Cheng at Boston University will be recognized with the Charles Mann Award for Applied Raman Spectroscopy. Leading up to the conference, Cheng sat down with Spectroscopy to talk about the advancements being made in confocal Raman microscopy.

Raman microspectroscopy can be used to characterize polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Pavi Sundararajan, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA Ames Research Center, explains how.

Webinar Date/Time: Thu, Oct 1, 2026 11:00 AM EDT

An upcoming interview with Ji-Xin Cheng, a Theodore Moustakas Distinguished Professor in Photonics and Optoelectronics at Boston University, will highlight his ongoing work in coherent Raman scattering microscopy.

Reliability, dynamic measurements, artificial intelligence, and real-world applications are reshaping Raman spectroscopy – while Molecular Photonics points toward new translational frontiers.

Jurgen Popp, Thomas Mayerhofer, and colleagues at Leibniz IPHT and Friedrich Schiller University Jena introduce the Personalized Optical Digital Twin (PODT), a Photonics21 contribution to Europe's Virtual Human Twin ecosystem that connects molecular photonics—Raman blood analysis, coherent Raman tissue imaging, and multimodal endomicroscopy—with longitudinal physiology and clinical data. Drawing on the published multicenter INTELLIGENCE trials, the authors argue that technical feasibility and clinical utility must be evaluated separately as the field moves toward Europe's FP10 research agenda.

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.

A proof-of-concept study combines a convolutional neural network feature extractor with the conventional hit quality index (HQI) to improve Raman spectral comparison, reducing spurious similarity and improving discrimination between closely related protein and antibody spectra.

Top content published this week include a historical examination of the James L. Waters Symposium, an obituary of Peter Griffiths, and an article examining Raman spectroscopy instrumentation.

A new peer-reviewed article discusses how pairing quantum mechanics with nanomaterial-based Raman spectroscopy has significantly boosted the technique's sensitivity.

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.

Researchers have developed a new validated attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared (ATR-FTIR) and Raman spectroscopy framework for forensically distinguishing automotive vinyl wraps by manufacturer, color, and finish.

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 recent study presented a new system for testing metal contamination on microplastics.

A recent review article examines how AI-assisted spectroscopic tools are propelling forensic trace evidence analysis forward.

A recent study presented a new method for identifying textile fibers using Raman spectroscopy and deep learning.

A hybrid Uniform Design and process-data calibration strategy improves Raman-based PLS model development for real-time monitoring of ultrafiltration/diafiltration and in vitro transcription steps in biopharmaceutical manufacturing.

The 29th International Conference on Raman Spectroscopy (ICORS 2026) is set to have a gala dinner cruise for conference attendees to enjoy.

A forensic case study using FT-IR, portable Raman spectroscopy, and SEM-EDS to differentiate three-layer automotive coatings from a hit-and-run accident, demonstrating that combining complementary spectroscopic and elemental techniques improves the accuracy of paint evidence identification.

The Altar Stone cannot be taken to a laboratory for analysis, but portable Raman analyzers are getting the job done on-site.