SciX 2026 Award Winners: The Conversations Coming Next

The Winners

The honor roll spans Raman, atomic spectroscopy, microfluidics, and planetary science, with a heavy tilt toward one question: can spectroscopy leave the lab and survive in the real world?

There's a Utah subplot worth noting. Porter is an emeritus professor at the University of Utah. Kitt is an Emerging Leader working in the same department. The ACS award Porter now holds once went to Cheng, and Porter won the Charles Mann Award in 2025, the year before Cheng. The Raman community is smaller than it looks.

Joining them in our interview series is Alessandro De Giacomo of the University of Bari Aldo Moro, Editor-in-Chief of Spectrochimica Acta Part B. He isn't an award winner this year. We're talking to him because of his laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) research, including nanoparticle-enhanced LIBS and a drone-mounted LIBS system he'll present in the SciX Innovation Award session.

The Questions We Intend to Ask

Each interviewee gets six questions. Here are the ones we expect to make them squirm, think, or both.

Does it work outside the lab? This is the fault line running through almost every interview. We'll ask Jürgen Popp what actually broke when AI-assisted Raman blood analysis left controlled research conditions for real infection diagnostics. And we'll ask how a surgeon is supposed to use a molecular readout from a fiber probe mid-procedure. We'll ask Marc Porter how close SERS immunoassays really are to clinical deployment after years of promise. Sara Fraser-Miller's model microcalcifications sit in wax, not tissue. We want to know how far that is from a real breast-imaging suite.

Is the simulation telling the truth? Siddhartha Das's molecular dynamics simulations show flow in brush-grafted nanochannels reversing direction under stronger fields. It's a striking result. We'll ask how confident he is that it survives contact with experiment.

Can you sell it? Ji-Xin Cheng has co-founded two companies from his own lab's technology. We'll ask him what separates a technique that works on the bench from an instrument someone will pay for.

One shot, roughly 140 million miles away. On Mars, Ryan Jakubek usually can't take another measurement. His work has traced SHERLOC's background bands to a deliberate design choice: uncoated fused-silica optics. He was unable to be interviewed at this time.

Why walk away from plasmonics? Jay Kitt built surface-area-enhanced Raman as an alternative to plasmonic SERS. We'll ask which SERS weakness drove him off that road. We'll also ask about his pivot to PFAS testing as Director of Chemistry at Litmus Analytical.

What was missing tells the story. Kevin Wilkinson found many particles carrying arsenic, antimony, bismuth, indium, and tin, but no copper. He detected airborne metalloids up to 6 km downwind. We'll ask what that means for the community living there and for the regulators who are supposed to protect it.

And the wild card. Porter's talk compares the physics of Raman scattering to hitting a 95+ mph major league fastball. We're going to make him explain that.

On Stage and in Print: The Research to Watch

The talks at SciX 2026, and the papers behind them, are where the boldest claims get made in public. These are the ones we'll follow up on.

A LIBS system that flies. Alessandro De Giacomo will present a fully operational in-flight LIBS system, mounted on a drone, that does quantitative elemental analysis. Laser plasma is hard enough to control on a bench. Doing it from a vibrating aircraft with refocusing lag sounds close to impossible. His team says a self-calibrated approach makes it work, and we want the details.

Twenty-one elements in a single particle. In his Strock Award keynote, Kevin Wilkinson reports detecting up to 21 elements in individual particles across hundreds of thousands of them. He also found that lead isotope signatures varied with particle size. This isn't abstract nanoscience. It's a forensic tool for pollution.

Flow that runs backward. Siddhartha Das's talk covers electroosmosis in soft nanochannels. His simulations show an overscreened brush layer driving flow by coions, and "electroslippage" that boosts flow and generates energy at the same time. A machine learning model is part of the story too.

The optical digital twin. Jürgen Popp's vision is an individual optical "baseline" for each patient, with deviations that predict disease. We'll ask how much data it takes before a deviation means something rather than noise.

A lipid headcount. Jay Kitt's most recent paper finds that 7 to 8 lipid molecules around each gramicidin A channel feel its hydrophobic mismatch. That number could shape how we think about antimicrobial peptides and drug design.

The journal's best, in person. De Giacomo, Editor-in-Chief of Spectrochimica Acta Part B, also runs the session honoring that journal's three best papers of the year. We'll ask what set this year's picks apart.

What Comes Next

Over the coming weeks, Spectroscopy will publish a one-on-one interview with each of the eight award winners, plus Alessandro De Giacomo on his LIBS research. We'll also cover the research behind their SciX presentations. Expect straight answers about what works, what doesn't yet, and what these scientists think the field is getting wrong.

We'll also ask every interviewee the question that matters most to the next generation: what should a student starting today actually learn? Their answers may not match what's in the curriculum.

If you think Raman is ready for the clinic, that nanoscale simulations can be trusted, or that a drone can't do real chemistry, these conversations will test your assumptions. Stay tuned.