Previewing the SciX 2026 Keynote Lecture

At the upcoming SciX 2026 Conference, which will take place from October 4–9, 2026, in Sparks, Nevada, Jennifer Dionne, a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University, will present new nanophotonic and artificial intelligence (AI) methods for detecting biochemical signatures at rates far exceeding current technology.^1,2 Dionne’s talk will take place on Sunday October 4, from 6:00 to 7:15 pm in the Sierra 5 conference ballroom.²

Dionne’s keynote address, which is titled "Exploring Light and Life: Nanophotonics and AI for Molecular Sequencing and Single-Cell Phenotyping," will go over the work that Dionne and her laboratory are conducting at Stanford. Dionne and her team’s work is focused on a silicon-photonic chip platform called VINPix, which is short for "Very-large-scale Integrated high-Q Nanophotonic Pixels."² The technology is designed to capture biological information at a scale and speed that current instrumentation cannot match, addressing what Dionne's group describes as a substantial gap between the information density of biological systems and the data-handling capacity of existing sensing tools.²

What will Dionne talk about specifically in her Keynote Lecture?

Part of Dionne’s talk will focus on the challenge that the VINPix platform was designed to address. As outlined in the talk’s abstract, the biosphere transmits information at rates estimated to exceed those of human technological systems by nine orders of magnitude.² The VINPix platform is intended to narrow that gap by using dense arrays of photonic resonators, achieving quality factors ranging from the thousands into the millions, with resonator densities exceeding 10 million per square centimeter, to detect multi-omic signatures, meaning genetic, protein, and metabolite data, on a single chip.²

Acoustic bioprinting fabricates the chips, which is a method for locally functionalizing individual resonators with different chemical probes, paired with an AI framework built to interpret the resulting signals.² Dionne's team has already tested one application of the system, which involves integration with autonomous underwater robots operated by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, used for targeted detection of genes, proteins, and metabolites in marine environments.²

What other applications can the Si-chip microsystems potentially be used in?

Beyond environmental sensing, Dionne will discuss two further uses for the Si-chip microsystems. One is peptide sequencing from the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), which is a protein group key to immune recognition. Individual peptides are attached to each resonator, and dynamic Raman spectroscopy tracks amino acids being cleaved off one at a time from the peptide's far end, allowing the sequence to be read residue by residue.² Paired with computational metadynamics, which is molecular simulation method, the resonators can also help identify previously uncharacterized molecular species.²

And finally, the other application is single-cell analysis within the tumor microenvironment. Dionne will discuss in her presentation that the resonator arrays can distinguish subcellular features and functional states of cells in this environment, with potential to predict drug resistance, macrophage polarization, and T-cell activation state.²

Why should attendees listen to the Keynote Address?

Dionne’s talk, at its core, highlights the current technological innovation that is ongoing in analytical spectroscopy. The main claim that the presentation will make is that the dense arrays of high-Q resonators can be manufactured and functionalized at scale while retaining sensitivity to individual molecular events, and this has implications for fields ranging from environmental monitoring to cancer immunotherapy research.²

You can read more about the upcoming SciX 2026 conference here.

References

1. Wetzel, W.; Spectroscopy Staff. Previewing the Upcoming 2026 SciX Conference. Spectroscopy Online, 2026. https://www.spectroscopyonline.com/view/previewing-the-upcoming-2026-scix-conference (accessed September 2, 2026).
2. Dionne, J. Exploring Light and Life: Nanophotonics and AI for Molecular Sequencing and Single-Cell Phenotyping. Presented at the SciX 2026 Conference, Sparks, Nevada, October 4, 2026. Available at: https://www.scixconference.org/onlineprogram