ICORS 2010 Returns to the U.S.

When thinking of things that happen once every 14 years, one might come up with a list that included comet sightings, animal migrations, and possibly a few other odd occurrences you don’t see every day. Certainly this list would not include academic conferences, yet this is just what happened recently in Boston, Massachusetts, as the 22nd Annual International Conference on Raman Spectroscopy (ICORS) came to U.S. soil for the first time since 1996.

Long considered an excellent academic research conference for the latest information on techniques and applications of Raman spectroscopy, this conference has migrated from continent to continent for some time and hadn’t seen the U.S. since it was held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania way back in the twentieth century. Perhaps because of this, ICORS generated an immense amount of interest in the spectroscopic community this year, among scientists and vendors alike. So popular was it, in fact, that Spectroscopy’s resident Raman expert, Fran Adar, chose to do a spontaneous write-up of the event in the October installment of her column, “Molecular Spectroscopy Workbench.” All of the cutting-edge presentations and technical sessions are described here, along with the latest developments in the field of Raman research that emerged from the meeting. If you couldn’t be there yourself, this is the next best thing, as this will surely be the most comprehensive review of the conference to be published in the industry.