SciX 2026 in Sparks: Raman Moves Toward the Clinic, Chemometrics Revisits Its Foundations

Abstract

This summary draws on the SciX conference website, the daily online program, and coverage published by Spectroscopy (Spectroscopy Online), organized chronologically from Monday, October 5, through Friday, October 9. The meeting opened with a keynote by Stanford University's Jennifer Dionne on nanophotonic sensor arrays and artificial intelligence (AI) for molecular sequencing. Award sessions through the week honored Jürgen Popp (Ellis R. Lippincott Award), Marc Porter (ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry Award in Spectrochemical Analysis), Ji-Xin Cheng (Charles Mann Award for Applied Raman Spectroscopy), Siddhartha Das (AES Mid-Career Award), Kevin Wilkinson (Lester W. Strock Award), Sara Fraser-Miller (inaugural Peter Griffiths Award), and Jay Kitt (Spectroscopy's Emerging Leader in Molecular Spectroscopy). Recurring themes were field and clinical deployment, machine learning paired with closer scrutiny of what signals mean, matrix effects as the main barrier to adoption, and the incentives that shape research.

Introduction

SciX, branded “The Great Scientific Exchange,” is presented each year by the Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Societies (FACSS), a nonprofit federation of analytical chemistry societies. It hosts the annual meetings of the AES Electrophoresis Society, the Coblentz Society, the North American Society for Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (NASLIBS), and the Society for Applied Spectroscopy (SAS).¹ The 2026 meeting returned to Sparks, which last hosted SciX in 2023, following meetings in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Covington, Kentucky; FACSS traces its international conference to 1974.² The program combined symposia, contributed talks, posters, plenaries, and short courses with an exhibition that ran October 5–8.² Eleven short courses ran Sunday through Wednesday, covering topics such as Raman, LIBS, and UV-vis-NIR spectroscopy alongside data-analysis skills.³

The opening keynote set the tone for the week. Jennifer (Jen) Dionne, Professor of Materials Science and, by courtesy, of Radiology at Stanford University, presented “Nanophotonics and AI for Molecular Sequencing and Single-Cell Phenotyping.”⁴ Dionne, who is also deputy director of the DOE-funded Q-NEXT quantum initiative, a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator, and cofounder of the protein-sequencing company Pumpkinseed, described silicon-photonic resonator sensor arrays known as VINPix (very-large-scale integrated high-Q nanophotonic pixels). Her laboratory has deployed them on autonomous underwater robots from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute for targeted gene, protein, and metabolite detection and, combined with chemical functionalization and AI, applied them to multi-omic signatures and to peptide and glycoconjugate sequencing.⁴

Monday, October 5: Vibrational Spectroscopy Meets the Clinic

Monday's plenaries opened with Jürgen Popp, the Lippincott awardee, on data-driven clinical Raman spectroscopy and optical digital twins, followed by Rohith Reddy (University of Houston), recipient of the Clara Craver Award, on photothermal mid-infrared imaging for biomedical diagnostics.⁵ In his interview with Spectroscopy, Popp (Leibniz IPHT and Friedrich Schiller University Jena) called clinician trust the hardest translational barrier and discussed AI-assisted label-free Raman analysis of blood for infection diagnostics, fiber Raman probes used during surgery, and a personalized optical digital twin built on longitudinal baselines.⁶ The Lippincott and Craver award sessions added talks on forensic Raman, point-of-need NIR, spectroscopy and quantum chemistry, fluorescence lifetime imaging in neurosurgery, Raman2RNA spatial omics, and clinical IR microspectroscopy.⁵

Parallel sessions covered single-particle analysis, from urban air pollution source apportionment to steel alloys; mass spectrometry of glycans and gas-phase ion structures; PFAS and environmental analysis, including IR detection of PFAS in water and QCL-IR microscopy of microplastics; food forensics; NIR for real-world problems; plasmonics; and Spectroscopical Society of Japan sessions on healthcare Raman and modern NIR. The afternoon ACS award session paired Marc Porter's talk linking interfaces, infrared and Raman spectroscopy, and baseball with Jay Kitt on surface-area enhanced Raman spectroscopy and Duncan Graham on point-of-use SERS detection of antimicrobial resistance genes.⁵

Porter (University of Utah) told Spectroscopy how SERS immunoassays and Extrinsic Raman Labels turned a spectroscopic signal into a practical diagnostic readout, and how they compare with fluorescence and colorimetric assays.⁷ In a follow-up, he described how sensitivity in a SERS tuberculosis assay fell by three to four orders of magnitude in human serum, and how an acid pretreatment that denatures serum proteins and frees the bound marker restored it; the test is now being commercialized with a UK company.⁸ Monday also opened the AES Electrophoresis Society's electrokinetics program.⁵ AES Mid-Career awardee Siddhartha Das (University of Maryland) described simulations in which overscreening in polyelectrolyte brush-grafted nanochannels drives coion-dominated electroosmotic flow, and even flow reversal at stronger fields.⁹ The day ended with the exhibits opening reception, daily poster sessions featuring work such as aflatoxin screening in peanuts by portable FT-MIR and simulated Martian Raman spectra, and an SAS early-career mixer.⁵

Tuesday, October 6: Coherent Raman, LIBS, and Nanoscale Infrared

After a plenary exchange on approaches to human health diagnostics by Reddy and Stuart Ibsen (Oregon Health & Science University), Ji-Xin Cheng (Boston University) delivered the Charles Mann Award plenary on continuous innovation in coherent Raman scattering microscopy.¹⁰ His award session added sum frequency generation microscopy, deep Raman sensing, Raman with machine learning for disease diagnostics, and chemical imaging of metabolism. The Spectrochimica Acta Part B award session focused on LIBS detectors, trace noble-gas monitoring, isotopic analysis for nuclear applications, and femtosecond plasmas for remote sensing, and a LIBS instrumentation session opened with Alessandro De Giacomo on plasma–nanoparticle interaction in tag-LIBS.¹⁰

In his interview, De Giacomo (University of Bari Aldo Moro) argued that laser–matter interaction and material ejection, rather than the plasma itself, are the least understood parts of LIBS, and described the trade-off between the sensitivity of large nanoparticle tags and the size limits of targets such as exosomes, especially in multiplexed analysis.¹¹

Two sessions on IR nano-spectroscopy and imaging covered quantum vibrational nano-imaging, depth sensitivity in photothermal methods, and time-resolved AFM-IR. Other sessions addressed pharmaceutical forensics, biopharmaceutical and vaccine analytics, low-frequency and deep-UV Raman, two-dimensional correlation spectroscopy, plasmonic sensing, PAT in vaccine manufacturing, AI-driven “artificial Raman expert” systems, and “Out of This World” analyses, including Raman polymorph monitoring in microgravity and laser ablation for space debris removal.¹⁰ The evening introduced “Spectrum of Perspectives,” a new dessert and networking event intended to foster a more welcoming culture in spectroscopy.¹²

Wednesday, October 7: Is Spectroscopy Ready for the Real World?

Spectroscopy's Wednesday report framed the day around deployment outside the laboratory.¹³ In the RSC Interdisciplinary Prize plenary, Graham described a SERS lateral flow assay for drug-induced liver injury now in clinical trial with the University of Edinburgh, and a food-site bacterial test detecting fewer than 5 CFU in under 5 minutes. A LIBS session reached into liquid sodium reactor coolants, time-resolved carbon speciation in solids, lithium in saturated brine (detection limit 0.3 mg/L), technetium quantitation alongside molybdenum, and femtosecond filament plasma gratings for remote isotope detection. Other sessions covered mid-infrared photonics and machine learning for biomedical spectra, and fluorescence excitation–emission matrix (EEM) monitoring of seasonal changes in drinking water.¹³

Thursday, October 8: Atomic Plenaries, Chemometrics, and the Emerging Leader

Three back-to-back plenaries opened Thursday in Sierra 5.¹⁴

• Lester W. Strock Award: Kevin Wilkinson (Université de Montréal) spoke on characterizing atmospheric particles with single-particle ICP-TOF-MS. He told Spectroscopy his group detected up to 21 elements per particle and tracked airborne metalloids up to 6 km downwind of an industrial site, with lead isotope signatures varying by particle size.¹⁵
• Peter Griffiths Award: Sara Fraser-Miller (Flinders University) presented deep low-wavenumber Raman detection of buried model calcifications. In her interview, she explained that a defocused micro-spatially offset configuration performed best (AUC 0.94) and outlined what remains before clinical breast imaging.¹⁶
• Emerging Leader in Molecular Spectroscopy: Kitt (Litmus Analytical) argued that academic science has spent decades optimizing for funding capture rather than discovery, with predictable costs in risk aversion, reproducibility, and tenure-track attrition; he faulted the system, not its people.¹⁷

The morning “New Challenges in Chemometrics” session questioned default assumptions.¹⁸ John Kalivas (Idaho State University) showed that visual sample selection in virtual reality could match or beat autonomous local regression on NIR data, and faster. Neal Gallagher (Eigenvector Research) found the generalized spectral angle mapper best for partially filled pixels in spectral imaging. Thomas Mayerhöfer (Leibniz IPHT) showed that complex-valued versions of CLS, ILS, PCR, and PLSR consistently lowered prediction errors. Md Nahid Hasan (Duquesne University) proposed outlier diagnostics for calibration-free models in continuous pharmaceutical manufacturing, and Federico Marini (Sapienza University of Rome) presented CovSel as one framework for feature selection across data structures.¹⁸

The afternoon Emerging Leader session followed with Zac Schultz on sheath-flow SERS, Caelin Celani on reflectance spectroscopy of 204 historical textiles, Jean-François Masson on neural networks for Raman grading of more than 700 maple syrups, Porter on how shed proteins explain implausibly low pathogen detection limits, and Carol Korzeniewski on in situ Raman of electrode-supported polymers.¹⁷ Parallel sessions covered isotope-based reconstructions of ancient climates, ICP-TOF-MS in bioimaging and nuclear forensics, Coblentz sessions on photothermal IR imaging including O-PTIR of micro- and nanoplastics, PAT in biopharma and agriculture, industrial Raman, forensics, and nuclear materials. The FACSS Innovation Award session featured De Giacomo on in-flight LIBS of volcanic ash and Kalivas on virtual reality data access for blind scientists, and the SciX Gala closed the day.¹⁴

Friday, October 9: Entrepreneurship and a Look Ahead

The meeting closed Friday morning with presentation of the FACSS Innovation and student poster awards, SciFri talks on entrepreneurship by Yolanda Fintschenko and Belinda Pastrana, and a preview of SciX 2027 in Albuquerque.¹⁹

Cross-Cutting Themes

Three threads connected the week. Deployment was treated as the real test, with methods taken into clinics, reactors, brine fields, food plants, and water systems.¹³,¹⁷ Machine learning appeared nearly everywhere, yet the strongest talks interrogated their own signals.¹⁷,¹⁸ And matrix effects, from serum proteins to saturated brines, remain the chief obstacle between a promising method and a trusted one.⁸,¹³

Final Summary

Read day by day, SciX 2026 in Sparks showed a field that is technically confident but increasingly self-critical. Monday's clinical Raman plenaries and Tuesday's coherent Raman and LIBS sessions highlighted methods moving toward diagnostics and harsh environments; Wednesday tested those methods outside the laboratory; and Thursday's chemometrics session and Kitt's plenary asked whether the community is optimizing for the right objectives, in its models and in its institutions. For practitioners, the takeaway is that sensitivity is no longer the main bottleneck; robustness to real matrices, interpretability, standardization, and clinical and regulatory trust are.

References

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(17) Workman, J., Jr. The Wrong Objective Function: Jay Kitt's Emerging Leader Plenary and Award Session at SciX 2026. Spectroscopy Online, October 8, 2026. (accessed Oct 13, 2026). https://www.spectroscopyonline.com/view/the-wrong-objective-function-jay-kitts-emerging-leader-plenary-and-award-session-at-scix-2026.

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(19) Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Societies (FACSS). SciX 2026 Full Schedule: Friday, October 9, 2026. SciX 2026 Online Program, 2026. (accessed Oct 13, 2026). https://scix2026.eventscribe.net/agenda.asp?startdate=10%2F9%2F2026&enddate=10%2F9%2F2026&BCFO=&pfp=FullSchedule&fa=&fb=&fc=&fd=.