Top content published this week include a panel discussion with five SpecAcademy instructors and a feature article on Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy.
|Articles|April 20, 2021
Fran Adar Wins NY/NJ Section of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy Gold Medal Award
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Fran Adar is the winner of the 2021 Gold Medal Award from the New York and New Jersey Society of Applied Spectroscopy (SAS). She will be presented with the award at the EAS Symposium taking place November 15–17, 2021, in Plainsboro, New Jersey. The annual EAS awards honor analytical chemists who have distinguished career achievements and who have advanced their fields by superior work in developing theory, techniques, or instrumentation.
Adar is a Raman applications scientist, manager, and principal scientist at Horiba Scientific in Piscataway, New Jersey, where she is a leader in Raman microscopy instrument and applications development. She received her BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania. She has authored more than 220 publications, leading to more than 2500 citations.
Adar’s pioneering work in the field of Raman microscopy has led thousands of scientists worldwide to use Raman spectroscopy in their work. She has developed many instruments, including the LabRAM-IR combined Raman and Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) microscope, which won the Gold Award at Pittcon in 2002 for the best new product at the conference.
The introduction of numerous sampling accessories and software capabilities, such as an internal on-axis neon source for precise frequency calibration, macro sampling options to adapt a microscope for cuvette measurements, immersion optics, and band-fitting improvements, are now industry standards and were the results of Adar’s ideas and development work.
Among the many awards Adar has received are the Career Award from the American Cancer Society, the Irene Dion Payne Award from the local Microbeam Analysis Society, the Charles Mann Award for Applied Raman Spectroscopy, the Williams Wright Award for Raman Spectroscopy in Industry from the Coblentz Society, and the Ernst Abbe Award from the New York Microscopy Society.
Adar is an elected Fellow in the Society for Applied Spectroscopy and holds a lifetime membership in the Coblentz Society. She is also a regular columnist for Spectroscopy, where she co-authors the “Molecular Spectroscopy Workbench” column, and a member of Spectroscopy’s Editorial Advisory Board
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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.
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Fourier-transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy, long the workhorse of molecular fingerprinting, is being reinvented by photothermal detection schemes and quantum cascade laser (QCL) sources that push spatial resolution and analysis speed far beyond classical dispersive and interferometric limits.
New instrumentation such as optical photothermal infrared (O-PTIR) microscopy and laser direct infrared (LDIR) chemical imaging is enabling sub-micron, label-free chemical mapping of biological, environmental, and pharmaceutical samples.
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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.
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.
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