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.
From November 16–18, 2026, the annual Eastern Analytical Symposium & Exposition (EAS) will take place at the Crowne Plaza Princeton Conference Center in Plainsboro, New Jersey. This will be the 65th iteration of the conference. Unlike in previous years though, this year’s conference will be heavily focused on data quality and artificial intelligence (AI), and the technical program features several talks dedicated to these topics.1
The theme of the EAS Conference this year is “Navigate the Future of Analytical Chemistry: Intelligence and Integrity.” 1 The keynote lecture at the conference will drive home this theme. The keynote speaker at EAS this year is Christopher R. Kinsinger, who is the Assistant Director for Catalytic Data Resources at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund. Kinsinger’s keynote presentation is titled “AI-Ready Data and Analytical Methods for Health Research,” and he will deliver it on Monday, November 16, at 4:15 pm.1
There will also be four dedicated technical sessions that reinforce this theme after the keynote presentation. The four topics that will be highlighted in these sessions include in-silico characterization of pharmaceutical products, integrating AI and real-world data into pharmaceutical development and quality, AI in spectroscopy, and data-driven analytical chemistry, from chemometrics to machine learning (ML).1
For laboratories in regulated industries, several Tuesday presentations address data governance, model credibility, and how analytical data choices affect AI performance and compliance. The speakers come from Alkermes, the United States Pharmacopeia, and Bristol Myers Squibb.1
Apart from the technical sessions, there will also be an on-site workshop led by Gaurav Chopra of Purdue University, which will cover neurosymbolic AI agents that connect computational method development with instrument execution. The workshop will focus on quantitative benchmarking of AI reliability and reproducibility.¹
Meanwhile, there will be six award presentations as well. A special awards session will take place on Tuesday November 17, from 1:15 to 4:30 pm.1,2 The recipients are:
Meanwhile, the Award for Outstanding Achievements in Magnetic Resonance will be presented posthumously to Robert W. Schurko. He directed the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance facility at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and was a professor of chemistry at Florida State University. Schurko died on February 20, 2026.3 His group developed sensitivity-enhancement methods for solid-state
Separately, Richard Crocombe of Crocombe Spectroscopic Consulting will receive the New York/New Jersey Section of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy Gold Medal at a Tuesday morning session on portable spectroscopy.1
The Monday afternoon anniversary session will feature four speakers, including Richard Zare of Stanford University, Graham Cooks of Purdue University, Peter Armentrout of the University of Utah, and Mary Ellen McNally of FMC Corporation.1 These talks will trace decades of mass spectrometry and separation science.1
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