Raman Spectroscopy for Homeland Defense Applications (PDF)

The inaugural Peter Griffiths Award winner discusses deep low-frequency Raman measurements through wax and what remains before clinical breast-imaging use.

Top content published this week include an examination of how near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy is being changed by machine learning and the final part in a panel discussion on spectroscopy education.

The recipient of the ACS Award in Spectrochemical Analysis discusses how surface-enhanced Raman scattering became a practical diagnostic readout and how close it is to clinical use.

A candid plenary on the incentives shaping academic science was followed by an afternoon of talks spanning flowing SERS detection, historical textiles, maple syrup, pathogen immunoassays, and electrochemical Raman microscopy.

The 2026 Ellis R. Lippincott Award recipient discusses the barriers to clinical adoption of photonic diagnostics and his vision for personalized optical digital twins.

Wednesday's program at SciX 2026 kept returning to one question: can spectroscopy perform outside the controlled laboratory? Speakers took surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), mid-infrared photonics, chemometrics, and fluorescence excitation–emission matrix (EEM) spectroscopy into clinics, food plants, reactor coolant loops, brine fields, and drinking water supplies.

Discover how handheld Raman spectroscopy is helping distinguish skin cancer from normal tissue, courtesy of researchers from Florida Atlantic University.

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. The interviews that follow won't just celebrate. They'll press on the gaps between simulation and experiment, between the lab bench and the clinic, and between a clever paper and an instrument someone will actually buy and use.