A History of The James L. Waters Symposium: Innovators, Instrumentation, and Applications, 1989-2026

Abstract

An archival and historical account of the signature legacy symposium of the Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy (Pittcon), with in-memoriam reflections on its founder, James Logan Waters (1925-2021)

Prologue: A Promise Made Over a Drink

Sometime in 1987, in a hospitality suite during that year’s Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy, a silver-haired entrepreneur named James L. Waters cornered a younger colleague, W. Richard “Dick” Howe, then chair of the Society for Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh (SACP). Waters had an idea, and he was, by every account, a formidable salesman. He wanted an annual platform, he explained, where the people who discovered a measurement technique in a university laboratory could share the stage with the people who had taken that discovery and built a business around it, a living bridge between basic science and the marketplace. If the SACP could make it happen, Waters pledged, he would personally fund it.¹

Howe could hardly refuse. Shortly after the conversation, several Pittsburgh chemists gathered with Waters for dinner in a back room of Casale’s Restaurant on the banks of the Allegheny River to work out the details: Howe; his successor-designate, Jay Auses; SACP chair-elect Sam Oliverio; and University of Pittsburgh professors David Hercules and Johannes Coetzee.¹ What emerged from that dinner became, by the time of this writing, a thirty-six-installment institution: the James L. Waters Symposium, one of the longest-running and most beloved traditions in the history of Pittcon. This is its story, and the story of the man who, characteristically, refused to let his name simply decorate a plaque when it could instead fund a living conversation between inventors and entrepreneurs.

1. The World That Made Pittcon, 1943-1950

To understand why a Framingham, Massachusetts instrument maker would care so much about a Pittsburgh chemistry meeting, one first has to understand Pittcon itself. In the early 1940s, Pittsburgh was one of the great industrial engines of the United States, producing steel, glass, aluminum, and chemicals, and the city employed a correspondingly large population of industrial chemists who had little in common with the largely academic American Chemical Society of the day.² In 1943, a group of those industrial analysts founded the Society for Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh; three years later, University of Pittsburgh emission spectroscopist Mary Warga organized the Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh.²

The two societies’ small annual meetings overlapped in membership and purpose, and in 1950 they merged their programs into a single event: the Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy, convened on the seventeenth floor of the William Penn Hotel in downtown Pittsburgh on February 15-17, 1950. Eight hundred attendees paid two dollars apiece to see fourteen exhibitors, among them Fisher Scientific, Jarrell-Ash, Bausch & Lomb, Consolidated Engineering, and Baird Associates, and to hear fifty-six technical papers.^1,2 Arnold Beckman attended that first meeting (and began exhibiting in 1955); Perkin-Elmer joined the exposition floor in 1951 with Paul Wilks proudly showing off the new Model 12 spectrometer; LECO arrived in 1952. By 1953 the exposition had grown to twenty-six companies, and a young Baird Associates marketer named Dick Reiss had turned his suite at the William Penn into a hospitality room so legendary for its poker games, with Dick Perkin and Charlie Elmer among the regulars, that it became part of Pittcon folklore in its own right.¹

It was this culture, fierce competitors sharing a card table by night and a trade-show floor by day, that a young infrared-instrument entrepreneur named Jim Waters first encountered when he brought his gas analyzers to Pittsburgh in the early 1950s. He could not have known it then, but his fortunes and the conferences were about to become, in Howe’s words, “remarkably contemporaneous and remarkably intertwined.”¹

2. James Logan Waters: An Entrepreneurial Life

2.1 Nebraska Roots and a Wartime Education

James Logan Waters was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on October 7, 1925, the descendant of a family that had crossed from Salem, Massachusetts, to the Midwest in the nineteenth century before his father’s career brought them back East, to Framingham, Massachusetts, in the early 1940s.^3,4 Waters was an independent, self-reliant child: a paperboy and Little League player who, by his own account, preferred figuring things out for himself. He enrolled at MIT through the Navy’s wartime V-12 officer training program, continued his studies as a physics major at Columbia University, and graduated in 1946 with a B.S. in electrical engineering and a commission as a Navy ensign.^3,4

In 1947, the twenty-one-year-old Waters joined Baird Associates, a small Cambridge-area maker of spectrographs, as a project manager’s assistant, soon promoted to project manager. He was assigned to Baird’s double-beam infrared spectrophotometer, then considered “state of the art,” but Baird’s management was unmoved by his proposed design refinements, and Perkin-Elmer, under Paul Wilks, soon overtook Baird’s early lead in that market.¹

2.2 A Company Born in a Basement, 1947-1958

While at Baird, Waters had read a captured German wartime report describing an infrared gas analyzer designed by Karl Luft, and he saw his opening. With $5,000 of his own savings and $14,000 borrowed from family, the twenty-two-year-old founded James L. Waters, Inc. in 1947, building instruments in the basement of his parents’ house in Framingham.^1,3

The little company’s gas analyzers caught the attention of Pittsburgh’s Mine Safety Appliances Company (MSA), and the relationship that followed would tie Waters permanently to the city and its conference. In 1955, Waters sold James L. Waters, Inc. outright to MSA, then spent three years as a consultant to the company while plotting his next venture.^1,3

2.3 Waters Associates and the Gel Permeation Chromatography Breakthrough

In 1958, Waters founded Waters Associates in the rented basement of the former Framingham police station, starting with just five employees. The young firm built bespoke instruments on contract: a hydrometer for U.S. Air Force balloon flights, a flame photometer for detecting toxic gases, another flame photometer custom-built to check the Indian Point nuclear power plant’s boiler water for corrosive salt contamination, and a small-volume differential refractometer for laboratory and process use.^3,4,5

The turning point came in 1961, when Dow Chemical polymer chemist John C. Moore asked Waters to build him an unusually small-volume refractometer. Waters built it without knowing its purpose; only after Dow filed a patent application did he learn that Moore had invented gel permeation chromatography (GPC), a way of separating polymers by molecular size. Dow granted Waters Associates an exclusive license to the technique, and the company converted the former police station’s female detention cells into a laboratory to manufacture the cross-linked polystyrene gel that Waters trademarked as Styragel.⁴

Floor-standing and, in the company’s own later description, “larger than a refrigerator,” the resulting GPC-100 instrument was introduced to the public at the 1964 Pittsburgh Conference at a price of $12,500; the company sold forty units that year alone. The following January, Waters Associates organized the first GPC Symposium in Cleveland, Ohio: two plenary lectures followed by roughly twenty papers from early adopters of the new instrument, a format successful enough that the company repeated it annually for years afterward.⁴

2.4 “The Liquid Chromatography People”

Waters’s ambitions for liquid chromatography (LC) outran GPC almost immediately. “We believe LC can become a mass market,” he wrote in an internal company memorandum from that period, “which will extend far beyond the research laboratory into production, quality control, and clinical testing.”⁴ After licensing, and then substantially redesigning, a Shell Development liquid-liquid chromatograph, Waters Associates introduced the ALC-100, generally regarded as the first commercial high-pressure liquid chromatograph, at the 1968 Pittsburgh Conference.⁴

A defining moment arrived in 1972, when Harvard’s Nobel laureate Robert B. Woodward, mid-synthesis of vitamin B₁₂, needed help separating two stubborn positional isomers. Waters personally carried an ALC-100 to Cambridge and, working with Woodward’s postdoctoral associate Helmut Hamberger, isolated 200 milligrams of the pure compound within about a week. The company later used this result, with a celebratory photograph of Waters and Woodward together, to advertise its capabilities to organic chemists.^4,5

Trademarking the tagline “The Liquid Chromatography People,” Waters Associates grew from five employees in 1958 to roughly 1,100 by 1980, with sales approaching $100 million a year and, by the late 1970s, a roughly 50 percent share of the entire worldwide LC instrument market, then estimated at $100-150 million.⁴

2.5 Stepping Back, and a Date That Sources Cannot Agree On

Waters relinquished day-to-day control of the company in 1972, becoming chairman while manufacturing chief Frank Zenie took over as president; the company went public in 1973 and relocated from Framingham to Milford, Massachusetts that same year.⁴

Exactly when Waters Associates merged with Millipore Corporation, however, is one of several points on which the historical record diverges. The Science History Institute’s catalog summary of Waters’s own 2002 oral history states that “Waters Associates merged with Millipore Inc. in 1977.”³ Waters Corporation’s own 2021 obituary press release states instead that “his tenure as President of Waters Associates lasted until 1979, when Millipore Corporation purchased the company.”⁵ Chromatography historian Leslie S. Ettre’s peer-reviewed 2005 LCGC retrospective, by contrast, dates the closing to “March 1980.”⁴ This account follows Ettre’s independently researched date of 1980, while flagging the 1977 and 1979 dates found in the other sources for the reader’s awareness (see Note on Sources and Discrepancies, below).

After the merger, Waters left day-to-day operations to pursue venture-capital opportunities, watched the Waters Chromatography Division spin back out as the independent, publicly traded Waters Corporation in the 1990s, and, per his own Pittcon Hall of Fame biography, became chairman of the drug-discovery firm Cetek Corporation and remained a resident of Framingham, Massachusetts.⁶

3. A Symposium With a Mission

The 1987 conversation that produced the Waters Symposium was not idle nostalgia; it reflected a conviction Waters had voiced for years: that the history of instrumentation was being lost precisely because the people who lived it were too busy building the future to write down the past. As later summarized in the introduction to the symposium’s published papers, Waters, “founder of the well-known Waters Associates, Inc., and…president of Waters Business Systems, Inc., arranged with the Society for Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh (SACP) in 1989 to offer an annual symposium at Pittcon to explore the origins, development, and commercialization of scientific instrumentation of established and major significance.”⁷

Here, too, the record once contained more than one date; the point is now resolved. The dinner at Casale’s and the hospitality-suite pitch that preceded it are placed by Howe’s own 2022 first-person account in 1987 ¹, and the symposium’s own published introduction and Pittcon’s archival materials describe the formal arrangement with the SACP as dating to 1989^7,8,9. In a July 2026 personal communication prepared for this history, Howe confirmed both dates directly: the original conversation took place in Atlantic City during Pittcon 1987, when he and Waters met “over adult beverages in the Committee Suite,” the formal agreement with the SACP followed in 1989, and the inaugural symposium was staged in New York City as part of Pittcon 1990.¹⁰ A 2022 Pittcon memorial webpage’s reference to 1997, which postdates the symposium’s eighth installment, is accordingly confirmed as a typographical slip for 1987.⁸

Waters’s own conditions for his funding were, by every account, simple and unusual for a corporate benefactor: the SACP alone would choose each year’s technique and speakers, with no input from Waters or his companies, and Waters would simply write the check that made it possible for the best possible speakers to attend.

4. How the Symposium Works

Each year’s Waters Symposium follows a structure that has changed remarkably little across thirty-six installments. A committee of SACP volunteers, known as the “Waters Committee,” selects a single analytical technique or class of instrumentation judged to have reached full commercial maturity, then identifies three to five speakers who collectively represent the technique’s academic inventors, its industrial commercializers, and its modern practitioners. The goal, as stated in the symposium’s own published mission, is “to ensure that the early history of this cooperative process be preserved, to stress the importance of contributions of workers with diverse backgrounds, objectives and perspectives, and to recognize some of the pioneers and leaders in the field.”⁷

Speakers historically received a modest honorarium (recorded at $500 per speaker in 2015 committee minutes) ¹¹, and for many years the session culminated in an invitation-only reception and banquet, funded, like everything else in the series, by Jim and Faith Waters, whose January 2015 gift toward that year’s symposium alone totaled $15,000.¹² Topic selection has typically run a year or more ahead of the event. The 2015 committee minutes, for example, record the shortlist already under discussion for the 2016 symposium: Orbitrap mass spectrometry, capillary electrophoresis, polymerase chain reaction, super-resolution optical microscopy, and ultra-high-pressure liquid chromatography. Committee members were assigned to scout attendance at each topic’s regular Pittcon sessions before a final vote.¹¹

5. Three and a Half Decades on the Podium: Symposium Topics and Speakers, 1990-2026

Table 1 presents the full roll call, compiled from the SACP/Pittcon archival record ¹³ and cross-checked against contemporary trade-press coverage.^{9,14,15,16,17} It is, in itself, a history of analytical chemistry’s instrumental imagination, from the gas chromatograph to generative artificial intelligence, with nearly every major measurement technology of the last seven decades represented somewhere along the way.

Table 1. James L. Waters Symposium Topics and Speakers, 1990-2026.

* No Waters Symposium was held in 2025; the installment count therefore continues uninterrupted from the 35th (2024) to the 36th (2026).¹⁸ consistent with W. R. Howe’s own references to the “32nd” (2021) and “33rd” (2022) installments ¹. Pittcon’s own contemporary press materials refer to the 2026 event simply as part of “Pittcon 2026” without a sequence number.¹⁹

6. Stories from the Podium

6.1 1990: Gas Chromatography, and a Spy Among Chemists

The inaugural Waters Symposium brought together Keene Dimick, Leslie Ettre, James Lovelock, and Albert Zlatkis to tell the story of gas chromatography’s birth.¹ Lovelock, a physician-chemist who built the electron-capture detector with A. J. P. Martin, helped design instruments for NASA planetary probes, and reportedly did intelligence work for Britain’s MI5, was, by Howe’s account, “a fascinating individual.”¹ But the symposium’s breakout star was the soft-spoken Keene Dimick, a U.S. Department of Agriculture chemist who built his own gas chromatograph from the published work of Martin and James in pursuit of an unlikely goal: isolating the essence of strawberries. He succeeded in 1953, turned his garage into a production line with his brother-in-law, founded Wilkens Instrument & Research, Inc. to sell the resulting “Aerograph” GC, sold the company to Varian in 1965, invented the Lifecycle exercise bicycle two years later, and retired to a Napa Valley vineyard that supplied grapes for Robert Mondavi’s award-winning Reserve Chardonnay.¹

6.2 1992: Infrared Spectroscopy and the Hospitality Suite Crowd

The third symposium, organized and presided over by University of Pittsburgh professor Foil A. Miller, reunited Miller with longtime infrared colleagues Bryce Crawford, Peter Griffiths, Norman Sheppard, and Jim Waters’s old friendly rival Paul Wilks. The associated banquet photograph, by Howe’s recollection, also captured spectroscopists “Wild Bill” Fateley, Dick Reiss, and Jeanette “Jeannie” Grasselli, who, though she never earned a doctorate, was awarded thirteen honorary degrees for her contributions to infrared and Raman spectrometry and her advocacy for women in the scientific workplace.¹

Photo 1. Banquet photograph from the 3rd James L. Waters Symposium on Infrared Spectroscopy, Pittcon 1992. Left to right, front row: Bill Fateley, Dana Mayo, Jeanette Grasselli, Bryce Crawford (speaker). Middle row: Norman Sheppard (speaker), Dick Reiss, Foil Miller (speaker), Jim Waters (sponsor). Back row: Peter Griffiths (speaker), Bob Hannah, Paul Wilks (speaker).

6.3 1993: Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and a Future Nobel Laureate

The fourth Waters Symposium, in 1993, brought together Ray Freeman, Paul C. Lauterbur, James Shoolery, and John Waugh to trace the development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Lauterbur, who earned his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, spoke about the technique ten years before he and Sir Peter Mansfield were awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), one of several Nobel laureates whose Pittcon appearances the Waters Symposium can claim among its speakers.¹⁸

6.4 1994: Mass Spectrometry, and the Founders’ Reunion

Of all thirty-six symposia, Howe singled out the fifth, 1994’s session on mass spectrometry, as his personal favorite. The night before the session, Waters and Howe dined with several of the field’s own founders: Alfred O. C. Nier, the physicist whose isotope-separation work Enrico Fermi had personally encouraged by letter in 1939, in connection with the nascent U.S. nuclear program; Fred McLafferty, whose enthusiasm for the symposium led to an annual invitation that included spontaneous renditions of the University of Nebraska fight song with fellow Cornhusker alumnus Jim Waters; Andrew “Jack” Sharkey; Seymour Meyerson; and Robert E. Finnigan, who in 1967 had used $99,000 in seed capital to found Finnigan Instruments, maker of the GC–MS systems that would become the gold standard for water analysis under the EPA’s 1970 Clean Water Act.¹ Howe later filmed a 37-minute interview with the then-95-year-old Finnigan reminiscing about that 1994 evening, a conversation recorded only weeks before Jim Waters, also 95, passed away.¹

6.5 1994: The Pittcon Plenary: Waters in His Own Words

Jim Waters’s relationship with the conference reached a kind of apex in 1994, Pittcon’s forty-fifth-anniversary year, when then-president Howe invited Waters to be one of three keynote speakers reflecting on the parallel evolution of Pittcon and the instrumentation industry, alongside Foil Miller and computing-and-chromatography pioneer David Nelson.¹ Waters, characteristically, arrived late, prompting a panel-mate to invoke the old conference adage, attributed to chemist George Pimentel: “No matter where you are at Pittcon, you are expected to be at least one other location.”¹

When Waters did take the stage, he reminisced about joining Baird Associates in 1947 as “a 21-year-old kid, fresh out of college,” describing the “art” of working with servo systems, potentiometers, snap switches, Dumont oscilloscopes, high-vacuum diffusion pumps, and vacuum tubes, and recalling the sensation caused by Beckman’s vacuum-tube pH meter in 1935. He read aloud an old list of scientific suppliers: ARL, Beckman, Bramson, Brookfield, Browning, Bush. He challenged the audience to recognize how many remained. “The past was great,” he concluded, “but the present is very nice.”¹

Waters also presided that year over a companion plenary, “Pioneers in Analytical Chemistry,” at which he sparred good-naturedly with his old infrared rival Paul Wilks and needled longtime friend Richard Zare after a particularly erudite Zare presentation left the audience, in Waters’s telling, “dumbstruck” and without questions.

6.6 1998: Immunoassay, and Another Nobel Laureate on the Podium

The ninth symposium, on immunoassay, brought together Roger P. Ekins, Eugene W. Straus, Edwin F. Ullman, Anders Weber, and Rosalyn S. Yalow. Yalow, a medical physicist, had shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her co-development, with Solomon Berson, of radioimmunoassay, the technique that made the symposium’s subject possible; her appearance placed a second Nobel laureate on the Waters Symposium podium alongside the many industrial and academic pioneers the series has honored.¹⁸

6.7 2016: Super-Resolution Microscopy and a Room Full of Nobel Laureates

Eric Betzig accepted Howe’s invitation to join the twenty-seventh Waters Symposium, on super-resolution microscopy, in 2016. The session’s question-and-answer period turned into an impromptu reunion of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry cohort: W. E. Moerner, who shared that prize with Betzig and Stefan Hell for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy, was in the audience as that year’s Coulter Keynote Speaker. Two years later, in 2018, the third member of the trio, Stefan Hell, returned to Pittcon as its Plenary lecturer, giving Pittcon a rare run of appearances by all three laureates of a single Nobel Prize within a few years of one another.¹⁸

7. Into Print: The Waters Symposium in the Scholarly Record

Publishing the symposium papers has been a recurring priority of the SACP since the series began. The first symposium’s papers appeared in LCGC Magazine; the second through fifth ran in Analytical Chemistry; and beginning with the sixth symposium, the series found a long-term home in the Journal of Chemical Education, where it ran under the standing rubric “Waters Symposium,” coordinated for years by University of Pittsburgh chemist Johannes F. Coetzee.^7,20

Table 2. Publication Record of the James L. Waters Symposium Papers.

The eleventh symposium’s papers, on X-ray diffraction of powders and thin films, included International Centre for Diffraction Data scientist Ron Jenkins’s sweeping overview of powder-diffraction instrumentation from Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen’s 1895 discovery of X-rays through the synchrotron era; the paper itself is now a frequently cited reference on the history of the technique.⁷

8. The Pittcon Hall of Fame, 1999

Pittcon’s fiftieth-anniversary year, 1999, under the leadership of Pittcon president Tom Conti, brought Jim Waters a second, complementary honor.¹⁰ Working with the Chemical Heritage Foundation (now the Science History Institute), Pittcon unveiled what was then displayed, under the banner of the Antiquities Museum, as The Pittsburgh Conference Walk of Fame;¹⁰ it survives today as the Pittcon Hall of Fame, a permanent exhibit of poster-sized biographical panels honoring pioneers of the analytical instrumentation and laboratory-supply industries. The Pittcon Heritage Award, presented jointly by Pittcon and the Science History Institute every year since 2002, inducts one new member annually.^26,27

The size of that inaugural class is now settled. In his July 2026 personal communication prepared for this history, Howe cites the official record directly: “The inaugural class consisted of 21 individuals as celebrated by 16 induction presentations (and 16 display panels)” (Pittcon ’99 Final Program, p. 121).¹⁰ The twenty-one honorees were Walter Baird, Arnold Beckman, Howard Cary, Wallace Coulter, Keene Dimick, Robert Finnigan, Chester Fisher, Maurice Hasler, William Hewlett and David Packard, Joshua Jarrell, Martin, Bennett, and Martinez, Erhard Mettler, Richard Perkin and Charles Elmer, Arthur H. Thomas, James Waters, and the Varian brothers, Russell H. and Sigurd.¹⁰ The class was further commemorated in Made to Measure, a fiftieth-anniversary supplement published by the American Chemical Society in 1999 under the direction of Today’s Chemist at Work and Analytical Chemistry editors Jim Ryan and Alan Newman.¹⁰ Earlier secondary recollections of the class size, including Howe’s own 2022 tribute remarks (18 members)¹ and Chemical & Engineering News’s 2009 retrospective (22 “pioneering figures”),² appear to have counted individuals and multi-person panels somewhat differently; this account follows Howe’s page-cited figure from the official 1999 program as the most authoritative available.

Photo 2. James L. Waters (left) with W. Richard Howe, former Pittcon President (1994) and the last surviving founding member of the Waters Symposium concept (1990), at the 1999 inaugural induction ceremony for the Pittcon Hall of Fame.

Howe later recalled a quieter coda to that festive evening, which had also featured a keynote address by then-Pittsburgh mayor Tom Murphy: as he and his wife Betsy left the empty convention center long after the ceremony, he spotted one couple still standing before the eight-foot Jim Waters panel: Jim and Faith Waters, alone, taking one last look. “That mental image,” Howe wrote, “is one that I carry with me to this day.”¹

Photo 3. Pittcon Hall of Fame biographical panel for James L. Waters, inducted 1999. (Photo courtesy of Brian Strohmeier.)

9. The People Who Made It Happen

A symposium that has run for thirty-seven years does not run itself. Behind every podium has stood a quieter roster of SACP volunteers, University of Pittsburgh faculty, and Pittcon staff who selected topics, recruited speakers, balanced budgets, and made sure that Jim and Faith Waters always had the hotel room they preferred. Table 3, assembled from W. R. Howe’s 2022 tribute remarks, his July 2026 personal communication, and the SACP’s January 2015 Waters Committee meeting minutes, credits as many of them as the surviving record allows; it is, by its nature, incomplete, and the authors welcome corrections and additions from anyone who served on the committee over the decades.^1,11,12,10

Table 3. People Who Organized and Supported the James L. Waters Symposium.

10. Pandemic, Tribute, and Renewal, 2020-2022

The COVID-19 pandemic forced Pittcon’s technical program entirely online for 2021, and with it, the 32nd Waters Symposium. Jim Waters, then ninety-five and no longer able to travel to the conference in person, had not attended in several years. But thanks to the efforts of that year’s symposium chair, Brian Strohmeier, and Pittcon registration assistant Shelley Forget-Simpson, Waters logged into the virtual session himself. Howe, tipped off and monitoring the attendee roster, recalled letting out an audible whoop when Waters’s name appeared.¹

Waters emailed Howe shortly after the session concluded, on March 9, 2021: “The ZOOM record for future review will be a great benefit to the future. Imagine hearing todays ZOOM presentation in 2035. A great lesson in how things improve in time. My health is excellent. It’s just that travel when you are 95 is not as much fun as it is when you are 85. At 95 it’s not fun at all.”¹

Energized by the exchange, Howe, with Brian Strohmeier, University of Pittsburgh’s Steve Weber, and with the blessing of Waters’s daughter, Barbara Ropp, began planning a videotaped oral-history session with Waters, to be filmed in Boston by Pittcon staff videographer Scott Kozuch. Travel restrictions delayed the plan. Jim Waters died on May 17, 2021, ten weeks after his email to Howe and just shy of his ninety-sixth birthday.^1,3,5,18,28

In his place, the SACP and Pittcon organized a tribute session at Pittcon 2022 in Atlanta, held virtually due to continued COVID-19 concerns, featuring remarks from Waters Corporation CEO Udit Batra, Pittcon dignitary Lalit Chordia, Waters’s daughter Barbara, Ron Majors, David Walt, and Howe himself, whose remarks form the single richest primary source consulted for this history.¹ The 33rd Waters Symposium that same week, on supercritical fluid chromatography, co-chaired by Steve Weber and featuring speaker Milton Lee, carried on the tradition uninterrupted.^1,8

11. A New Chapter: Generative AI and Pittcon 2026

By its thirty-sixth year, the Waters Symposium had outlived its founder by half a decade and had, fittingly, turned its attention to the newest disruption in the analytical chemist’s toolkit. The 2026 symposium, “Generative AI in the Analytical Chemist’s Toolbox for Chemical Measurements,” convened on March 9, 2026, in San Antonio, Texas, presided over by Daniel W. Armstrong of the University of Texas at Arlington.^9,19

The session opened with a plenary lecture by 2025 Nobel laureate in Chemistry Omar M. Yaghi of the University of California, Berkeley, on “AIMATRY,” his proposed new discipline of AI-guided materials discovery. M. Farooq Wahab of the University of Texas at Arlington followed with a case for generative AI as a “Ph.D.-level” collaborator on signal processing and chemometrics; Rasmus Bro of the University of Copenhagen offered a chemometrician’s historical caution about validation and overfitting; and the session closed with a talk from Spectroscopy and LCGC-Spectroscopy editor Jerome Workman, Jr. on bridging classical chemometrics and generative AI in calibration and spectral interpretation.¹⁹

It is a measure of how completely the Waters Symposium has folded itself into the working life of the analytical chemistry community that its own most recent installment was, within hours, the subject of a conference report, written, fittingly, by one of its own featured speakers.¹⁹

12. Epilogue: Coming Home to Pittsburgh

Pittcon last met in its namesake city in 1967, before a hotel workers’ strike sent the conference touring through Cleveland, Atlantic City, New Orleans, Orlando, and Chicago for the next six decades.² In April 2027, sixty years after that last Pittsburgh meeting, Pittcon will return home to the David L. Lawrence Convention Center.²⁹

The thirty-seventh James L. Waters Symposium, it will be presented in the city where the conversation between Jim Waters and Dick Howe, and before them the founders of the Society for Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh and the Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh, first made the whole improbable enterprise possible. It seems a fitting place for the next chapter of a tradition built, from its very first dinner at Casale’s Restaurant, on the simple conviction that science is made by people, and that the people deserve to have their stories told.¹⁸

13. Nanopore Technologies: The 37th James L. Waters Symposium, Pittcon 2027

As this history goes to press, the SACP’s Waters Committee has confirmed the topic for the thirty-seventh James L. Waters Symposium, to be presented at Pittcon 2027 in Pittsburgh: “Nanopore Technologies for Bioanalytical Applications.” Evolving from the Coulter counter principle, nanopores, which use resistive pulse sensing (RPS), have become vital tools in bioanalytical chemistry for label-free, single-molecule detection of DNA, RNA, proteins, and nanoparticles, allowing researchers to size, count, and analyze targets with high precision and speed. Compelling applications have already emerged from the technology, including DNA/RNA sequencing, disease biomarker detection, and nanoparticle characterization. While the original Coulter counter was used to count biological cells in a sample, nanopores can extract from each single-entity measurement a range of information, including size, concentration, shape, dipole, zeta potential, electrophoretic mobility, biopolymer length, binding affinities, enzyme action, and structural modifications such as epigenetic, epitranscriptomic, or post-translational changes. The symposium will open with a short historical perspective on nanopore technology, followed by presentations from pioneers in resistive pulse sensing using biological and solid-state nanopores across a range of bioanalytical applications.

The confirmed program for the 2027 symposium is as follows:

• • Steven A. Soper, University of Kansas, Short Introduction – “A Historical Perspective of Nanopores for Single-molecule Detection.”
• • Mark Akeson, University of California Santa Cruz and Oxford Nanopore Technologies, “Biological Nanopores for Sequencing DNA and RNA.”
• • Zuzanna Siwy, University of California Irvine, “Conical Nanopores for Biophysical Measurements: Basic Operational Principles.”
• • Stephen Jacobson, Indiana University, “Building Series Nanopores for Bioanalytical Determinations: Capsid Assembly.”
• • Adam R. Hall, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, “Plastic In-Plane Nanopores for Detecting and Identifying Both Small and Large Biomolecules.”

The subject of Nanopore Technologies was proposed and organized by Professor Steven A. Soper, University of Kansas.

Note on Sources and Discrepancies

This history draws on archival materials supplied by the authors (an internal PowerPoint compilation of symposium topics and speakers, 1990-2026; a tribute script delivered by W. R. Howe at Pittcon 2022; a January 2015 letter and committee minutes from the Pittsburgh Conference office; a photograph of the Pittcon Hall of Fame biographical panel for James L. Waters; the Science History Institute’s 2002 oral history of James L. Waters; and a July 2026 personal communication from W. R. Howe offering comments and clarifications on an earlier draft), supplemented by published trade-press coverage, company histories, and the scholarly record.¹⁰ Several factual points could not be fully reconciled across sources when this history was first drafted. Four have since been resolved through Howe’s July 2026 personal communication and a July 2026 communication from Brian Strohmeier relaying additional comments from Howe, and are marked RESOLVED below in black text; one remains open and is retained in red text, in addition to being noted in context above, for the benefit of future researchers and editors:

1. The year the symposium was conceived. RESOLVED. Accounts once placed the originating conversation between Jim Waters and W. R. Howe in 1987, described the formal arrangement with the SACP as dating to 1989, and, in one 2022 Pittcon memorial webpage, cited 1997. In a July 2026 personal communication prepared for this history, Howe confirmed the full sequence directly: the original conversation occurred in Atlantic City during Pittcon 1987; the formal agreement with the SACP followed in 1989; and the inaugural symposium was staged in New York City as part of Pittcon 1990.¹⁰ The 1997 date is accordingly confirmed as a typographical error.

2. The year Waters Associates merged with Millipore Corporation. Cited variously as 1977 (Science History Institute catalog summary of Waters’s own oral history) and 1979 (Waters Corporation’s 2021 obituary press release), versus 1980, specifically “March 1980,” in chromatography historian Leslie Ettre’s 2005 peer-reviewed retrospective. This account treats 1980 as the best-supported date. This discrepancy remains unresolved.

3. The size of the inaugural 1999 Pittcon Hall of Fame class. RESOLVED. Previously described as 18 members by W. R. Howe’s 2022 tribute and as 22 “pioneering figures” by Chemical & Engineering News’s 2009 retrospective. Howe’s July 2026 personal communication supplies the page-cited figure from the official Pittcon ’99 Final Program (p. 121): 21 individuals across 16 induction presentations and display panels. ¹⁰The earlier figures of 18 and 22 appear to reflect looser counts of individuals versus multi-person panels.

4. The spelling of an SACP officer’s surname. RESOLVED. Rendered “Sam Oliverio” in W. R. Howe’s 2022 tribute script and “Sam Olivario” in Howe’s own January 2015 letter to Jim Waters. Howe’s July 2026 personal communication confirms the correct spelling is “Oliverio.”¹⁰

5. The 2025 installment of the symposium. RESOLVED. No topic, speaker list, or symposium number for a 2025 Waters Symposium appeared in the archival compilation supplied for this history because no symposium was held that year. Pittcon confirms that no James L. Waters Symposium was convened in 2025; the series resumed in 2026, which is accordingly the thirty-sixth installment rather than the thirty-seventh.¹⁸

Photos 1 through 3 are embedded above at their respective locations, courtesy of the author and Brian Strohmeier.

References

(1) Howe, W. R. Script for the James L. Waters Tribute Session, Pittcon 2022 (conducted virtually); unpublished manuscript provided by the author, 2022.

(2) Brock, D. C. Pittcon Turns 60. Chem. Eng. News 2009, 87 (8). https://cen.acs.org/articles/87/i8/Pittcon-Turns-60.html (accessed June 2026).

(3) Waters, J. L. Oral History Interview by A. Thackray and A. Daemmrich, Framingham, MA, August 21, 2002; Science History Institute, Oral History Transcript 0262; Philadelphia, PA. https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/w9zns3t (accessed June 2026).

(4) Ettre, L. S. Jim Waters: The Development of GPC and the First HPLC Instruments. LCGC North Am. 2005, 23 (8). https://www.chromatographyonline.com/view/jim-waters-development-gpc-and-first-hplc-instruments (accessed June 2026).

(5) Waters Corporation. Waters Corporation Celebrates the Life and Legacy of Its Founder, Jim Waters; Business Wire: Milford, MA, May 19, 2021. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210519005620/en/Waters-Corporation-Celebrates-the-Life-and-Legacy-of-its-Founder-Jim-Waters (accessed June 2026).

(6) Pittcon Hall of Fame. James L. Waters (1925– ), Inducted 1999 [biographical exhibit panel]; Pittcon Conference + Expo: Pittsburgh, PA, 1999; photograph of panel supplied by the author.

(7) Jenkins, R. Waters Symposium: X-ray Diffraction of Powders and Thin Films: Landmarks in the Development of Powder Diffraction Instrumentation. J. Chem. Educ. 2001, 78 (5), 601–606. https://doi.org/10.1021/ed078p601.1

(8) In Memory of James L. Waters; Pittcon Conference + Expo, archived conference webpage, 2022; copy retained in the Waters Symposium Committee files.

(9) James L. Waters Symposia. Pittcon Conference + Expo. https://pittcon.org/conference/james-waters-symposia/ (accessed June 2026).

(10) Howe, W. R. University of Pittsburgh. Personal Communication (comments and clarifications on the history of the James L. Waters Symposium), July 1, 2026.

(11) Waters Committee Meeting Minutes, January 20, 2015; Pittsburgh Conference Office: Pittsburgh, PA, 2015; unpublished internal document.

(12) Howe, W. R. Letter to James L. Waters, January 12, 2015; The Pittsburgh Conference: Pittsburgh, PA; unpublished correspondence.

(13) James L. Waters Symposium at the Pittsburgh Conference, 1990–2026: Topics and Speakers Archive; Society for Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh, PA, 2026; unpublished compilation.

(14) Unique Component of the Pittcon Technical Program: 2009 Pittcon Final Program—Pittcon Web Archives, The 20th James L. Waters Annual Symposium, 2009, pp 42–43. https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/24501338/2009-pittcon-final-program-pittcon-web-archives (accessed June 2026).

(15) Pittcon to Highlight UHPLC Techniques at 30th James L. Waters Symposium. News-Medical.Net, January 23, 2019. https://www.news-medical.net/news/20190123/Pittcon-to-highlight-UHPLC-techniques-at-30th-James-L-Waters-symposium.aspx (accessed June 2026).

(16) Pittcon Announces Highlights of Waters Symposium. Wiley Analytical Science News, 2013. https://analyticalscience.wiley.com/content/news-do/pittcon-announces-highlights-waters-symposium (accessed June 2026).

(17) Pittcon Announces the 2017 James L. Waters Symposium. Wiley Analytical Science News, 2016. https://analyticalscience.wiley.com/content/news-do/pittcon-announces-2017-james-l-waters-symposium (accessed June 2026).

(18) Strohmeier, B. Pittcon Conference + Expo. Personal Communication forwarding additional comments and clarifications from W. R. Howe on the history of the James L. Waters Symposium, July 2, 2026.

(19) Workman, J., Jr. Pittcon 2026 Conference Report: Generative AI Enters the Analytical Chemist’s Toolbox. Spectroscopy, March 10, 2026. https://www.spectroscopyonline.com/view/pittcon-2026-conference-report-generative-ai-enters-the-analytical-chemist-s-toolbox (accessed June 2026).

(20) Coetzee, J. F. Obituaries. Chem. Eng. News 2009, 87 (15). https://cen.acs.org/articles/87/i15/Obituaries.html (accessed June 2026).

(21) Waters Symposium: High-Performance Liquid Chromatography. Snyder, L. R. Modern Practice of Liquid Chromatography: Before and after 1971. J. Chem. Educ. 1997, 74 (1), 37–48. https://doi.org/10.1021/ed074p37

(22) Waters Symposium: Ion-Selective Electrodes. Frant, M. S. Where Did Ion Selective Electrodes Come From? The Story of Their Development and Commercialization. J. Chem. Educ. 1997, 74 (2), 159–182. https://doi.org/10.1021/ed074p159

(23) Waters Symposium: Lasers in Chemistry. Bloembergen, N. Nonlinear Optical Instrumentation. J. Chem. Educ. 1998, 75 (5), 555–570. https://doi.org/10.1021/ed075p555

(24) Waters Symposium: Immunoassay. Coetzee, J. F. The Annual James L. Waters Symposium at Pittcon—Preamble. J. Chem. Educ. 1999, 76 (6), 767–792. https://doi.org/10.1021/ed076p767.2

(25) Waters Symposium: Atomic Emission Spectroscopy. Jarrell, R. F. Introduction to the 10th Annual James L. Waters Symposium at Pittcon: Atomic Emission Spectroscopy. J. Chem. Educ. 2000, 77 (5), 573–607. https://doi.org/10.1021/ed077p573.2

(26) About HOF (Hall of Fame). Pittcon Conference + Expo. https://pittcon.org/hof/hof-about/ (accessed June 2026).

(27) Pittcon Heritage Award. Science History Institute. https://www.sciencehistory.org/about/awards-program/pittcon-heritage-award/ (accessed June 2026).

(28) Waters Corp. Founder and Namesake Jim Waters Dies at Age 95. Boston Globe, May 19, 2021. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/19/business/waters-corp-founder-namesake-jim-waters-dies-age-95/ (accessed June 2026).

(29) Pittcon Returns to Pittsburgh after 60 Years in 2027. Pittcon Conference + Expo. https://pittcon.org/pittcon-returns-to-pittsburgh-2025/ (accessed June 2026).

About the Authors

Jerome (Jerry) Workman, Jr. is on the Editorial Advisory Board of Spectroscopy and is the current Assoc. Editorial Director. He is the co-host of the Analytically Speaking podcast and has published multiple reference text volumes, including the three-volume Academic Press Handbook of Organic Compounds, the five-volume The Concise Handbook of Analytical Spectroscopy, the 2nd edition of Practical Guide and Spectral Atlas for Interpretive Near-Infrared Spectroscopy, the 2nd edition of Chemometrics in Spectroscopy (now beginning work on the 3^rd edition), and the 4th edition of The Handbook of Near-Infrared Analysis. He was an invited speaker at the 2026 James L. Waters Symposium and is the recipient of the 2020 NY/NJ SAS Gold Medal Award (with Howard L. Mark).

Brian R. Strohmeier has over 40 years of research experience in the field of materials surface characterization. He has been self-employed since 2025 as the Principal and Founder of his own consulting company - Surface Science Solutions, LLC. Brian holds a Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh and an M.A. degree in Leadership from Duquesne University. He is the co-inventor of two U.S. patents and the author/co-author of 66 publications involving materials science, as well as scientific leadership topics, with an H-index of 22 and more than 3,300 citations. He has also authored/co-authored over 150 oral and poster presentations (53 invited) at conferences and other scientific meetings. Brian was the 2024-25 Chair of the Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh (SSP) and will serve as the 2027 President of the Pittcon Conference and Exposition (Pittcon), which will be held in Pittsburgh for the first time in 60 years.

W. Richard (Dick) Howe retired after 45.5 years at the University of Pittsburgh where he served for 30 years as an Arts & Sciences Associate Dean. He has been a member of the Pittcon organizing committee for 46 years including serving as President for Pittcon 1994. He was Chair of the Society for Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh (1986-87), and he has served the Science History Institute, International Science and Engineering Fair, and the International Chemistry Olympiad.

Howe has received the Pittsburgh Award and the Distinguished Service award from the Pittsburgh Section of the American Chemical Society, and an Alumnus of Distinction Award from St. Vincent College.

Stephen Weber is Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh and has participated in Pittcon since the early ‘80s serving as the Chair of Publicity, Short Courses, and Program. He has mentored over 125 graduate and undergraduate researchers leading to over 220 publications and a half-dozen patents in bioanalytical chemistry and related topics. As a member of the Society for Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh he served on multiple committees, most importantly on the James L. Waters Symposium committee.