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In this Q&A article, we highlight several prominent researchers being recognized at the 2026 SciX Conference for their significant contributions to spectroscopy and photonics and discuss what these researchers talked about at the conference.

Amy Colleran, a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Centre of Metabolomics Research at the University of Liverpool, is exploring how to detect volatile organic compounds by bubbling them directly into colloidal silver and gold nanoparticles.

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.

In this segment of our SciX interview with Kevin Wilkinson, a professor of environmental chemistry at the Université de Montréal, discusses extending lead isotope work to greater distances and explains why graduate students need adaptability, critical judgment, and coding skills more than expertise in any single instrument.

Atomic spectroscopy has quietly gone from counting elements in bulk to counting single nanoparticles, imaging tissue at the micrometer scale, and reading Martian rocks from several meters away. The instruments got smaller, the software got smarter, and the questions they can now answer got a lot more interesting.

At SciX, Jay Kitt discusses a project applying Raman spectroscopy to PFAS analysis, the mentoring role he found after leaving traditional academia, and why machine learning could unlock the biochemical information in vibrational spectra.

In this “Tutorial Tuesday” clip, Peter Larkin, who is a Manager of Spectroscopy, Thermal Analysis, and Chromatography at Syensqo, highlights how people use the method or technique that they are comfortable with, even if it’s not the best one to use.

UV-vis absorption spectroscopy, one of analytical chemistry's oldest and most accessible techniques, remains foundational to cutting-edge science, underpinning the Nobel Prize-winning discovery and synthesis of quantum dots and continuing to evolve through ultralow stray-light optics, chip-scale sensors, and AI-integrated process analyzers.